On Wednesday morning, we had a special visitor! Janene Caldwell from Teton Valley Hospital came to our classroom and spoke specifially about bones and x-rays. She brought with her old films and examples of broken bones. We saw bones of children, adults and even bones who had diseases and were sick. Janene also told us that x-ray films are not really used anymore, and like many things - all the x ray pictures are stored on a computer. We saw a picture of the big x-ray machine that is used to take pictures in the hopsital because it was obviously TOO big to bring to our classroom. We discovered that while x-ray pictures go right through skin and muscle, it does not go through metal, and we saw an xray of a woman wearing a necklace and earrings!

In other project news - Trout in the classroom had a exciting week! We had our first few trout hatch on monday and tuesday from eggs into alevin. They are lively and healthy and swimming everywhere. For now, they remain in the small floating basket and we have the protective cover on to keep it dark until all eggs have hatched. Our daily scientists record observations such as temperature, date, report any casualties and the condition of the tank.

This week we had many extra things happening in our classroom. We have embarked on our human body, and in addition, we are starting our Trout in the Classroom project. On Tuesday, volunteers from Trout Unlimited and Friends of the Teton River set up our tank, and showed us all the different parts. Later in the week, our eggs arrived and we were able to share this experience with the Mustangs. Since eggs like to be in the dark, we have to keep our tank covered most of the time, at least for now. We also have a new "trout helper". This means, a different student every day will make observations of our fish and tank. Some things we have to record are the temperature, how many have died, and whether we think the tank is clean. As the trout grow, we will eventually have to measure water quality parameters like pH. We learned that our eggs should hatch next week and that they will become alevins!

In Human body news, we have been talking mostly about our skeleton this week, and that we have 206 bones in our body!  The last of our five senses, sight we looked at closely on Tueday and Wednesday. We learned that our eyelashes protect our eyes, that our pupil, is not actually a black dot, but a clear opening that lets light in our eye. We had fun with this one as we made eyeball masks!

This second week back at school, we continue to move through our project. We are still organzing what we want to learn from such a large topic. Through books, duscussion, sharing times etc. we have all put ideas into a web. For us, our interests are finding out more about our body: our skeleton, muscles, organs, and all the systems), professions related to the human body, and how to be healthy. This week we finished with our experiements in learning more about our five senses. The last two were hearing and sight!

We have embarked on the study of the human body and all that it may entail this week. The most appealing to us was to learn and experience our five senses. This was a fun way to start because it involves us and our senses in a direct way. That means EXPERIMENTS! Whenenver a student hears that word, it must be interesting. At the start of the week we started with taste. We were a bit "blind" (literally) going into it, but all students gladly participated and then we had several constructive conversations to follow. We will explore all the senses before moving onto different body systems.