Posted on: March 8th 2019
Some of our Form 6 pupils have written about their recent trip to the Grant Museum of Zoology, to support their current Science topics:
On 4th March, Form 6 were lucky enough to go to the Grant Museum of Zoology. Once we arrived, we met professors from UCL named Dr Martina Wicklein and Professor Pedarzani (who is also Leonard’s mum).
After an explanation of what the museum contained and a discussion about evolution, we got into groups of three or four and looked around. We were asked to find five different ways in which the animals had been preserved: pickled, dried, stuffed, fossilised and where just the skeleton had been kept. We then came back and talked about our findings.
Next, we classified sweets into a classification tree. We first split them into two groups and kept on splitting them until we ended up with all of the sweets in separate groups. This was done by looking at their shared characteristics like them being chocolate or sweets, single sweets or bars, sealed or twisted wrappers etc. We had been creating similar trees and branching keys in our Science lessons at school.
Finally, we completed an Animal Bits Bingo where we got into small groups and looked for particular animal parts that we had been given close up pictures of for example feet, hands, wings, skulls, toes and bones. Our group containing Imogen, India, Alanna and I (Emily) got 11/14!
It was a great trip and we’d like to thank Dr Wicklein and Professor Pedarzani for being amazing teachers and letting us visit the Grant Museum.
By Emily and Imogen
Today we went to the Grant Museum as a year group. Before we left, we were all expecting something very different to heads in jars, spiders on display and brains. And that was only three out of the many hundreds of incredible but sometimes disgusting things!
I was engaged with the spiders and Zane was interested in the turtles but scared of the frogs. All of us were fascinated by everything really!
By Aaron and Zane
There were hundreds of skeletons in the room, not just of humans but animals as well. There were also real brains on display and plastic models such as an elephant heart. We found that this tested our observational skills and linked in with the learning about animal adaptations and the brain which we have been concentrating on in class.
Overall, everyone enjoyed the trip and we can all agree that it was a super day out!
By Amelie and Keya