CLARK, NJ — Fifth-grade students at Valley Road Elementary School in the classes of Alyssa Englert, Jessica Zerella and Colleen MacNamara recently dissected owl pellets to learn about their eating habits, then identified the bones and reconstructed them into a skeleton. Students were learning about ecosystems and food webs. They explored an owl’s eating habits and learned about their role as a tertiary consumer or carnivore in their ecosystem.
Students spent several days carefully dissecting the owl pellets and separating the different pieces of undigested materials – fur and bones. Students meticulously cleaned each bone that they found and compared them with the different prey that an owl consumes – mice, voles, etc. They then pieced together the bones that they discovered and reconstructed into a skeleton. Finally, students created a poster, demonstrating their understanding of concepts learned throughout the life science unit, drawing a food chain and labeling the different creatures – producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers and decomposers.
According to Englert, “Once they got started, they were so excited about all of the amazing things they found – tails, spines, and skulls were most exciting!”
Photos Courtesy of Christine Casale Broski