Students in Grade 4 science have been working hard learning the ins and outs of taxonomy and classification. They have been learning about Carl Linnaeus (the father of taxonomy) and learning how the system he created 300 years ago provides the framework we still use today. We have spent time discussing the idea of grouping organisms by the ways they are similar and dissimilar and using the macroinvertebrates from our own collection as examples for when orders/families/classes/genus separate from each other and become a new group of organisms.
Some of our class time has also been dedicated to continue to care for our crayfish collection. My room is starting to look a little like a rescue center for aquatic species and we currently have eight working aquariums!
Crayfish are omnivores and scavengers. They will eat pretty much anything... plants, insects, fish, alive things, dead things, and even other crayfish! We've been trying to stop the carnage and separate out our species into individual tanks and I think we've finally reached a good balance. The other highlight has been that we observed a pair of crayfish mating, which in addition to being really cool, was super helpful in helping us understand the anatomy of a crayfish. The difference between a male and female can be told by looking at the size of the uppermost swimmerets on the abdomen. When we completed our crayfish anatomy lab that was one of the things that had most of us stumped because most of our crayfish all looked like they had the same size swimmerets. Now that we knew we had a female and a male we could compare their swimmerets and finally could see the difference in size clearly. We have isolated the female crayfish and hope that her eggs will fertilize and come to fruition. If we get baby crayfish you'll be sure to know!
The crayfish mating ritual usually consists of the male and female grappling together for one to two hours. I kept my eye on them all morning and our mating pair was linked together for more than three hours! When I came back from lunch they had disconnected and each crayfish had retreated to the corner farthest from the other one. This would lend itself nicely to a class on healthy relationships, but in our 4th graders case I just silently chuckled to myself and moved on.
Crayfish enjoying a piece of turkey at Thanksgiving
Grade 5 and 6
I haven't sent a lot of updates from Grade 5/6 recently because they have been immersed in the same work for a few weeks now. They have completed their independent experiments around pill bugs and have been working on putting together powerpoint presentations that highlight their experiments and findings. This week they will present these findings to their class. I will be videotaping the presentations and have those to share with you all via the blog sometime next week. I am very proud of the effort the students have put into their projects and presentations and can not wait to see the fruits of their labor!
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