It's the thing most moms– and students– dread about high school biology…
dissections.
But are biology dissections too gross to do at home?
Can you really put them all over the dining room table?
Will the smell of formaldehyde permeate the house?
Most importantly, will everyone start throwing up? {I know you were thinking it!}
Last week we dissected crayfish in our co-op biology class. Have a look at this video and decide for yourself if the dissections are too gross for you to do as a homeschool mom.
This is not a technical video where you watch a dissection from start to finish. This is a tour of our fourteen student class room. Does anyone look too grossed out to you?
Of course, there were some students that were a little queasy over dissecting the earthworm the week before, so the jury may still be out as to just how gross all the dissections will be. We still have the perch and the frog dissections to come. The frog will be the real deciding factor, I think.
(Apologia was brilliant when they decided to work the dissections up from the least gross/ complex animal to the more complex/ gross. A little desensitization will go a long way.)
But are the dissections worth attempting? If you had asked me three weeks ago, I would have said NO, but now I would say YES- they are so worth it!
So head over to Nature's Workshop Plus and buy some dead critters… uh, dissection specimens.
HomeSchool High is sponsored by Apologia.
I hope you'll tell them a big "thank you"!
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Now it's your turn. What have you been doing this week with your high school teens?
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(#HSHigh)
Ideas, Resources, and Friends…
so It's not so scary.
I’m really glad that our co-op group did a biology dissection lab class. I did not want to do it at home!
We had a great time with our dissections. I think dissections are an important part of understanding Biology…just like experiments help with the understanding of chemistry. We did them outside on the patio for a little extra air! 🙂 Nice post.
I respectfully submit another point of view:
We haven’t done textbook dissections, but more out of principle than out of the ick-factor.
I have issues with the idea of killing something just to be able to satisfy a curriculum goal. Yes, if the student will need these skills later on, it can be important, but I question whether we are justified in killing creatures for those teens who have no interest or future in biology.
On the other hand, if something is dead or is getting killed for food anyhow, which God has specifically allowed, it only makes sense to learn about it as much as possible. So we’ve studied while butchering chickens. We have also collected skeletons found in the woods, and carried home countless dead butterflies. We’ve examined hearts, livers, and kidneys from the grocery stores.
For those teens considering a health care or vet future, a better option than dissections can be working on a farm. My oldest worked on farms for a while and did numerous vet-supervised autopsies of animals that had already died. She also helped with surgeries. She finally decided not to become a vet…and no animals were ever killed for her studies along the way.
I think the “ick” factor also depends on the temperament and age of the student. While one 16 year old daughter gags her way through dissection, her 13 year old sister is fascinated and goes beyond the steps in the textbook to discover other things as well. Two years ago, when an even older sister was doing her dissections, that same fascinated sister ran through the house showing each of us a fish eye, pointing out various structures. I was horrified by dissection in public school, but we took the frog from live, killed it ourselves and dissected it without considering the way God designed it.