Activity

Hi from California!  My students did the lesson this week and studied the ancestral whale bones, put them in order and started learning about the evolution of the whale.  We are in the middle of research and building our presentations.  We should be finished next week before they are out of school.  Not sure if I can actually do the extension piece, time in our curriculum is tight and I also have to find Astragalus stl. files for modern Hippo, Water Buffalo, Rhino, or Giraffe…?  I was going to have kids do the post survey and also complete my reflection this week.  Realizing I needed to simplify a lot in some areas of the lesson plan and in other areas the kids really got it.  Either way telling them all we had an ancient bone 3D printed from the University of Michigan’s library was super cool for them.  They completely connected how powerful it would be and smart to have a copy without the real thing so that we did not have fossils broken, lost, and so that multiple people could all be using the materials at once.  Kids love fossils and they were really inspired, this was a really fun project to do with them, even with the printer hiccups and running out of PLA, and then spools not fitting the machine.  Glad our IT guy was a good sport and helped me hack a way to get the machine to keep printing!