After hearing from a bunch of other friends from TpT about their success with owl pellets, I decided to dive into this with my class to wrap up our animals unit in science. I never dissected owl pellets before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, so I was kind of nervous. The Science Penguin was a lifesaver and sent me her Owl Science Unit to help prepare my students for the dissection.
If you’re thinking about teaching about owl pellets in your classroom, I suggest you show this video to your students. It really gave my class a good idea of how an owl regurgitates the pellets, and of course, they wanted to watch it over and over again. Owl Pellet Video
To prepare for this dissection, the day before, I set up an assembly line and had the students get a Zip Lock baggie, 2 toothpicks, a pair of gloves, a packet, and a pellet. They labeled their baggie and I kept it until we did the lab the next day. This saved me a lot of time passing items out the next day, or making the baggies myself. I had no clue how long this would take and only had about an hour at the end of the day for the students to do it.
I was actually quite excited with how this turned out. Although some students were kind of nervous at first, nobody was afraid of the pellets once they unwrapped it from the foil. This was probably the most engaged I saw my students in a long time…they became little scientists! I even got some “Mrs. Mazur, you are the best teach ever” comments while they picked apart the pellets. 🙂
Here are some pictures of my class in action.
I’ll definitely be doing this again next year!
