This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Students
My students are hard-working and amazing. They come to school happy and ready to learn each day. They speak a variety of different languages and come from homes where there is often not enough money for food, let alone lab projects. Most of my students do not have the resources to support buying extras. Our school does not have the money to buy all the consumable lab materials that we need.
My students are motivated by hands-on activities.
Hands-on inquiry helps my English language learners grasp a concept more quickly. It helps my active students stay more engaged with the lesson. All students learn better if they have the opportunity to do science instead of merely reading about it.
My Project
My students will be studying ecosystems, food webs, and predator/prey relationships. These owl pellets will help the students understand the kind of prey that an owl consumes. They will see the wide variation in the owl's diet. They will be able to make their own claims and find their own supporting evidence by carefully dissecting the pellets and identifying the bones of the prey.
Experiencing the dissection of the owl pellet makes a much bigger impact than merely reading about it in a book.
My students will activate many parts of their brain by actively participating in this activity. They will be dissecting, classifying, analyzing, manipulating, and questioning. They will collect their own data and use it to compare with the data of other students in their class and other classes. They will be able to use math to organize, compare, and graph the data to perform statistical analysis. There will be a much bigger buy in because they will have ownership over the data and the experiment.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Hetland and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
