Fifth-graders take lessons to heart
Students get chance to dissect sheep hearts thanks to video grant
Samantha Schubert, 10, (from left) Kassidy Harenda, 10, and Kiley Schneck, 11, react as they hold pieces of a sheep heart they were dissecting at Ronald Reagan Elementary School last week. The dissection was done with the help of a video conference held with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Photo By PETER ZUZGA
New Berlin — Fifth-grader Kiley Schneck sat at one end of a dissecting table at Ronald Reagan Elementary School looking slightly apprehensive.
She and her classmates were in the school media room to dissect sheep hearts.
Kiley was uneasy because she knew that where there is a heart, there is bound to be blood.
At the other end of the table was Zachary Karolek, who was looking forward to the dissection just for the gory aspect of it.
"I thought it would be awesome because you would see blood," Zachary said.
But to his disappointment, and Kiley's relief, there was no blood. The hearts were neat and solid.
But that was all right, Zachary said. After the dissection, he casually dangled half a heart from his gloved little finger that poked into the aorta.
"I liked to actually look inside the heart and see the atrium and the ventricles," he said.
He and Kiley were among all the fifth-graders at the school, 4225 S. Calhoun Road, who dissected the sheep hearts. The media room was outfitted with long tables where the students sat in small groups and shared the organs.
The students closely followed the step-by-step directions from Cleveland Museum of Natural History scientist Lee Gambil. He was dissecting a sheep heart at the same time in Cleveland and broadcast to Ronald Reagan on a big screen.
Gambil guided the students through the dissection and could see the classroom via a camera mounted in the room. He also was able to hear and answer questions the kids had.
Dissections do not usually come until high school or even college.
Students remember for years
But fifth-grade teacher Michael Marr - he put the program together with the help of Maria Lofy, school media specialist/librarian - said the goal is not only to educate youngsters, but to make school vibrant and relevant to them.
"The best way kids learn is hands-on experience," Marr said. "They actually see and make comparisons with the human heart and get to touch and feel, so they're not always looking at a book.
"They're going to remember this for 15 years or more," he said. The learning they got in one 45-minute session last week should also help them in their high school biology class, he said.
The sheep heart dissection was not a first. Marr and another teacher took their Prospect Hill Elementary School fifth-grade classes to the Medical College of Wisconsin about five years ago to do dissections. He has not done it since then because of a lack of funding until Lofy won an $800 grant for the video dissection.
Applying lessons to life
Dissecting a sheep heart is relevant to the kids' lives, too, Marr said.
"They hear about heart attacks and they live it in their own families with grandpas and uncles having heart attacks," he said.
The lesson is reinforced as teachers talk about how to take care of the heart and how eating fatty foods and smoking can hurt the heart, he said.
The heart that Samantha Schubert worked on had a layer of white fat partially covering the outside. "It reminded me of cheese curds," the youngster said.
And Liam said that because the heart was so muscular, "It wasn't easy to cut."
Young surgeon Kassidy Harenda said, "I liked it when I got to look at the veins and find out how blood flows through the heart."
"And," she added, "sticking my finger through the aorta."
Liam said the dissection made him aware of how delicate the heart is.
"I kind of figured that if one ventricle failed, the rest would," he said.
As the class left, the excited kids headed for sinks to wash their hands and discuss their experiences.
One boy proudly said, "I touched it five times."
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