Dissecting "Owl Vomit"

During the last couple of weeks of school, the 2nd graders did animal rotations. Hayden came home on his first animal-rotation day so excited about dissecting owl pellets he talked nonstop for about 30 minutes. Here are some things Hayden shared about his project:

-Owl pellets are like big hair balls - when an owl eats an animal, it can't digest things like bones and hair so it coughs them up. Hayden called it "owl vomit".

-Hayden assured me (even though I didn't ask) that his owl pellet was clean, sanitized in fact, so it was perfectly okay to touch it and dig through it.

-Hayden said it was the absolute coolest thing he has ever EVER done in school.

-Some of the girls liked it, but most of the girls thought it was gross.

-Hayden's owl pellet contained a couple of rodents - he knows there were two because there were two rodent skulls in his pellet.

-His assignment was to match as many rodent bones as he could find to each individual bone picture on his worksheet. Here is his worksheet:

Here is a picture of what owl pellets ("vomit") looks like before they are dissected:

Wow! 2nd grade is way cooler than it was when I was there.