Chapter 16 - Fishes, Amphibians, and Reptiles

A visiting teacher from years past gave me an idea of how to teach the 7th graders. During her 2 years here, she realized that there was no way she was going to get through all of the material in the book, so she let her 6th graders vote on which chapters they wanted to study. The 8th and 9th grade material goes in a somewhat orderly fashion and is needed for future classes, but the 7th grade material (Life Sciences) is more general. Their first choice - Fishes, Amphibians, and Reptiles.

So far, it seems like they made a good choice. In the last few weeks, we've had visits from fish, toads, tadpoles, and now a tiny snake, putting the two aquariams to good use. I pull out the magnifying glasses and let the students study them. There are rules, of course, like not touching the animals or tapping on the sides of the tank and trying to not scare the animals to death. These are the 7th graders, though, so I can only say that they get better every week and some days are better than others, as evidenced today when I turned around to see one student with the snake draped over her magnifying glass. (She did not get to finish the activity, btw.)

Where do we get these animals? It turns out that the 7th graders are very creative problem solvers when they want to be. Mr. Nate, one of the primary science teachers, clued me in a few months ago that if I need something, such as supplies or, apparently, small animals, the students can often come up with a solution. I told the class they would get extra credit points to bring in a fish. On lab day, Eduardo showed up at lunchtime with 3 bags of fish and a man from his father's fish shop. It turns out that all of the 20 students in 7th grade paid Eduardo 10 limperas (about 50 cents) to bring in a fish for them so that everyone could get the extra credit points and everyone got a fish to study. The frogs were not so easy. Only Kency could come up with an amphibian and she brought in a large toad. The next day, Alex found what may have been the same large toad and a smaller toad in the sand pile that he's using to pour concrete, but the lab was already completed. Anuar, in the spirit of getting extra credit points (and, hopefully, in the interest of being able to study more about amphibians), caught a container of tadpoles for the class. I think Alex and I were more excited than the students about looking at them with the magnifying glasses which revealed stripes, the fin parts of the tail, and little stubby legs that couldn't be seen with the naked eye.  Today, just in time for the introduction to our last section - reptiles - Alex turned up a small snake while working. Now that the 7th grade has studied it, I think I will look it up to find out if it's poisonous.