Science Lab

Ben's Science Class

Written by Ben
Illustrated by Ben
Experienced by Ben
Forced to be written by Amy



My science class has been veeeerrrrryy interesting this year, and I've only gone to four classes...

My science teacher (Miss Spencer) is like Miss Frizzle minus the magic school bus! Her house is practically a scientist's storeroom! She has everything from horse bones to aquariums to live animals.

I already wrote about the first week. On the second week, we brought in live toads, and we pithed them. For those of you who don't know, pithing is severing the spinal column and scrambling the brain so that the toad doesn't feel pain and can't move. Since they were pithed, we could dissect them without having to kill them first, meaning we could see the heart beating and all the organs doing their jobs. We cut up the toad, dug through all the internal organs, and examined everything. We also stuck a straw down it's throat and blew into it to watch the lungs inflate (don't worry, they didn't pop). I wonder what the toad was thinking....

The next week was even more gross, our dissection subjects were a rat, a fetal pig, and a fetal calf. I was assigned to dissect the calf (the biggest of the animals) and look through its body. The liver was hard to find because cows have four stomachs, which get in the way, but you knew that right? The pig wasn't too special, but the girls dissecting the rat had a surprise... it was pregnant! Miss Spencer exclaimed with delight, "This is the first time in 25 years that we've had a pregnant rat! I'm so exited!" The babies were very small, not much bigger than my fingernail, but there 10 of 'em, which explains why rats multiply so fast. Today there was no dissecting just studying bones. Horse bones to exact. She had almost an entire horse skeleton. Apparently some of the students from a different class found the bones in a swamp and brought them to her. It was cool - and next week we will be studying cats! Our teacher told us a story about how once, she needed cat skeletons for a class but the ones she ordered would not arrive in time. She was on her way to the class when, tadaa! Roadkill cat! She grabbed the stray cat, and threw it in the back of her truck, then she brought it to her class and they boiled it and got the bones... talk about a blessing from the Lord! That's all that happened so far but I will talk about more later (unless you were so disgusted you will never return to this blog of course :).