They have been studying the skeleton and know it has 206 bones. They can identify quite a few of them by name. They have watched each other jump rope and observed how joints work. They know what a patella does and why we can swing. Thursday they dissected owl pellets.
Owls eat rodents, but they can t digest hair and bones.
So just as cats cough up hairballs, owls cough up the indigestible parts of mice and voles. When Lopez s students teased apart the owl pellets with toothpicks, they discovered that rodents, like humans, have femurs and vertebrae. The lesson, part of a unit on the human body, is typical of the Brownsville Independent School District s new inquiry-based science curriculum. The Full Option Science System is being implemented in all elementary schools this year. FOSS provides kits of materials like owl pellets rather than textbooks so that students can learn science by acting like scientists.