Blizzard Delivery

I wrote a grant because our habitat lab had no animals in it. I had arranged delivery to be midweek to allow time to get the animals settled in their new home before the weekend. It was a blustery winter day and the snow started accumulating. By the end of the day an announcement was made about school being called off for the next day. Dismissal was a disaster with students having a mega-snowball fight and cars getting stuck in the circle drive. By 4:00 PM most of the teachers had icicles dangling from their hair. I was called to the office to pick up my package. I was not in the mood to unpack my animals and didn't feel comfortable about leaving them in my outside portable building in my classroom with the arctic temperatures. I loaded the box into my car and headed home. At home I started unpacking my treasures to discover more animals than I had ordered. Instead of receiving 20 hermit crabs I received 30 of them. In addition, I had three leaking bags of fish, some aquarium frogs, tadpoles, mussels, and pond plants. At home I did not have an aquarium to put all of these things in so I loaded everything into my car and headed for the nearest pet store. I could barely see as I navigated the treacherous streets. Upon arrival I convinced the store manager to rescue my newly acquired pets. The next day I called the company to find out the mistake was all mine. Apparently an aquarium assortment does not mean the tank and equipment, but rather 30 assorted animals. We certainly have a plethora of animals for our habitat lab now. I simply cannot wait to see what actually arrives in our pending order for after Spring Break.

My Gummi Bear Needs CPR

During the gummi bear lab, students were to measure and weigh their bears. We were studying about density. I had put a gummi bear in a clear plastic cup and labelled it "control." Unfortunately, somebody ate the control bear. "Oh dear," I said, "we are never to eat anything in the science lab." All of the fingers pointed to Eddie who quickly objected, "It wasn't me! It wasn't me!" I put another gummi bear back in the cup for our control bear.

The day before students wrote down their calculations of their bears and then we put them in clear plastic cups containing water. The students hypothesized about what would happen to the bears. I was thinking students would write about the bears weighing more because they would absorb the water. Some students thought their bear would weigh less because it would dissolve. One group wrote, "We hypothesize that our gummi bear is going to drown." On day 2 they wrote, "We were right. Our bear drowned and now he is decomposing. He has lost his legs."

Another student, Howie, said, "This is so unfair." I went over to his table and he was picking out little pieces of his bear in the water. Some bears just dissolved faster than others. He said, "Man! This is just wrong. My bear is obliterated." I had to laugh.

"Boys and Girls, at first our gummi bears sunk to the bottom. The bears were very dense. On day 2 our bears floated and were buoyant. And our control bear..." I turned to show the cup and noticed the bear was gone again. I looked at Eddie and he raised both hands up, "It wasn't me." I looked over at another group of students that were busily working together. Then I overheard them trying to do fake CPR on their bear. I had to laugh. I had all of the students put their cups back on the shelf and then started again. I just love my 4th rotation of science students. They are so funny. They are a challenge to keep on task and stay focused on the learning objective. I think it's because they have been quiet and focused in all their other classes and when they finally hit science, their last core subject of the day, they just can't help themselves anymore.