Darwin explains it

I  found  it  really  cool  to  learn  how  a  owl  coughs  up  pellets. I find it really cool to learn about Darwin because his theories were revolutionary and explain how animals evolve. I was surprised that there was so much fur when we dissected the owl pellets.  I am looking forward to learning more about Darwin and dissecting bigger specimens. 
Anne Sophie

Week Two -- Owl Pellets

This week we learned about owl pellets.  We started by watching a video about owls and learned things like:
1.  Barn owls are the most widespread bird in North America
2.  They like to live in barns as well as other places like church steeples.
3.  Owl pellets are found near where owls nest.
4.  Female barn owls are slightly larger than males, and their back feathers are darker.

We dissected our own owl pellets and found skeletons of rodents and birds.  Some students found more than one animal in their pellet, and one student had most of a rat skeleton but no skull!

We also learned about a research study done by scientists in Washington state.  They were reporting data from a new method they designed for finding out which owls are in a specific area.  Before, people used recordings of owl calls, but they realized that when two species of owls are near each other, the smaller owls don't call out in response to the recordings.  So, the new method used two dogs that were trained to find owl pellets.  The scientists found that using the dogs to find owls was more accurate than using the recordings.

week one discussion

I liked that we learned about the Kingdoms, it refreshed my memory and I learned some new information.

I learned that there are a lot of types bacteria, and I wish there weren't so many.

I felt that you did a good job in class explaining everything.

I'm looking forward to the owl pellets it sounds fun, and I'm excited.

i learned that there are more then 1,000 species of worms and i want to learn that more about more species of animals.

This class is cool because we get to learn about the classifications of animals. I learned that humans are a very small part of the pie of life. I'm super excited to get to dissect owl pellets tomorrow.

I think this class is cool because we learn about how animal bodies work. I learned that there are five animal kingdoms.I am excited to learn more about anatomy.

First class -- AWESOME!

Our group post:

We learned about the kingdoms and how life is classified.  We met people in the class and talked about what we're going to do.  It was cool to talk about which plants we thought were related to each other.  It's amazing how many tiny things there are and how many species of worms and bugs live on earth.  Animals are a small fraction of life on earth.

Introduction

This will be the class blog for the Anatomy and Dissection class taught by me, Jolien Connor, via Adventurous-Learning.  We are a group of homeschooled kids ages 9 to 14 who will be touching, talking about and teaching ourselves about animal anatomy through the use of dissection (but no tasting!).

For each class, students will post to the blog:
1.  What was cool about the class
2.  What they learned
3.  What more they want to learn about

I as the teacher will post a bit about cool facts I learned while planning each class, and some details about what exactly we did.

Stay tuned!