Cool Dissections!

My class likes to say "Science is never 'ew'! It's always 'cool'!" They reminded themselves of this A LOT on Friday because we dissected a sea star and a shark! Whenever someone said "EWWW!!", the other kids would say "Not 'ew'! It's COOL!!!" Kathryn came in to our class to do the dissection (as she knows WAY more about it than I do).

The kids LOVED dissecting both creatures! It was especially cool to see the sea star on the inside because back in March when they went to the Oceans in Motion exhibit, they learned about sea stars and how they have tubes inside of them that become filled with water. We actually got to see those tubes! We saw the sea star's mouth and stomach (it has 5 stomachs, one for each arm)! The intestines were attached to each stomach in each arm also!

The shark was neat too because we got to see the shark's heart and brain! Kathryn took out the shark's eye and let the kids touch it and hold it. They described it as a squishy grape! It was cool because on the back of the eyeball, you could see where the eye attaches to the brain! The kids were amazed at how big the eyeball was! They said they thought eyes were flat, not like balls! This picture is of D holding the eye! They got to touch the heart also! We also saw the shark's stomach and when Kathryn cut it open, there were lots of little shrimp inside! We saw the shark's stomach and all the internal organs like the liver, spleen, pancreas, etc. Kathryn explained to the kids what those organs do and compared the sizes of them to the sizes of the same organs in humans. The kids felt how rough shark skin is - almost like sandpaper!

They absolutely loved dissecting the animals! I hope we can do this every year!