Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
BodyXQ has one of the most impressive interactive apps of the heart that I’ve yet seen.
You can explore the heart in 3D while it’s in motion. You can see the valves open and close, while hearing the beat. I’m going to have to show this to the class tomorrow.
(Disclaimer: No actual pins were used.)
One of my student groups came up with an excellent way of presenting the organs of the digestive system in Biology class. They drew an outline of a person on the board and then had students in the audience stick drawings of the different organs onto the outline.
What worked particularly well was that they’d have someone from the class pin on the organ, and then they’d talk about it. This gave the presentation a nice rhythm, with a little break between each item.
While discussing homeostasis in biological systems, one of my biology students asked why humans could only survive with only a very narrow range of body temperature. Part of the answer is that the human body is a complex system, and the chemical reactions rely on enzymes that only work effectively within a narrow range of temperatures.
Worthington Biochemical has detailed (probably too much so for our purposes) introduction to enzymes: how they work, how they’re named, etc.
In particular, they have this useful graphical diagrams showing how enzymes have an optimum temperature and pH.
Yesterday, Dr. Sansone was kind enough to lead my Biology class through a small mammal dissection (details here). He’d brought in five New Zealand White rabbits (2 male and 3 female) that had been raised for market by an Amish family in northern Missouri.
Over our two-hour class period, we had time to examine the organs in the abdominal and thoracic cavities in some detail. Students had been prepared with group reading assignments of the different organ systems based on the anatomy outline.
After the dissection we removed the pelts and froze them for later preservation. We also froze the carcases for later. I’ve convinced Mr. E. that cooking them would be a great interim activity. Mr. E. is a bit of an epicure, so it did not take much convincing.
Only one student declined to participate in the dissection for ethical reasons. About half of the class declined to observe the harvesting. Four students volunteered to assist in the harvesting, two of whom were not even in my biology class. They were seniors. One of them, P., had done it before and demonstrated the procedure for us.
Because we have the opportunity to get a few rabbits, we’re starting Biology this year with anatomy. In the first week, our discussions will be based around the rabbit dissection so we’ll be focusing on the systems where the organs are easiest to find: the fluid regulation/excretory, respiratory, cardiovascular, reproductive, and digestive systems.
Linn (2000) has a good overview of general rabbit biology and the internal organs in Rabbits: Biology (pdf).
For lots of detail on how to dissect a rabbit try Bensley’s Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit (free on Google Books)
AnimalLearn.org has a good list of free and for fee online dissections of various organisms. No rabbits as of this moment though.
One of these days I’d like to put in a garden at school. Or maybe a few gardens. An indoor hydroponic system would be nice for the winter months, as would a greenhouse. However, the easiest thing to start with might be putting in some raised beds. To this end, the University of Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems has detailed information in their Teaching Organic Farming & Gardening: Resources for Instructors manual.
↬ Mr. Sansone.
This neat paper (Robertson et al., 2013) in the Journal of Geophysical Research makes an interesting attempt to explain the pattern of extinctions that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous: why most of the dinosaurs died out, and why ocean organisms were more severely affected than freshwater organisms by the long winter after the asteroid impact.
The flow chart explains:
They also include an interesting figure showing how long an organism might survive based on how large it is, which I may be able to use in pre-Calculus when we’re discussing log scales and linearizing equations.
![Allometric relationship between body size and time to death by starvation for multicellular poikilotherms in the absence of food (red, drawn from the equation of Peters [1983, p. 42]). Names of various types of organisms are shown as an indication of body size. Image and caption from Robertson et al., 2013.](http://MontessoriMuddle.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Robertson_et_al_2013_Fig1.png)
The article is written well enough that an interested high school biology student should be able to decipher (and present) it.