Want to have live animals in your lab but don't know how to get started?
Lora Holt M.Ed
Welcome to Live Materials 101, your one stop shop for information on how to handle and care for live materials in the classroom. This page will be expanding and growing as we add more care sheets onto this site. If you don't see an animal that you would like to host in the lab, drop us a line and we will be happy to get that care sheet out to the site as soon as possible. You can write to us at: [email protected]
Ordering Live Materials
Some Districts have a Live Materials Center where you can check out or order live materials to study in your clasroom. EPISD has a terrific Live Materials Center that carries both run of the mill and exotic animals that can be used as live materials studies. They may even provide terrariums or aquariums to host the animal based on availability.
Grants
If you are at a district that does not have a live materials program, there are still options that you can explore to make a live material study possible. One way to get animals if your school or district cannot afford to provide you with them is Pets in the Classroom.org This is an organization that will reimburse you for pet supplies, animal and habitat if you apply for a grant.
Ordering Live Materials
Some Districts have a Live Materials Center where you can check out or order live materials to study in your clasroom. EPISD has a terrific Live Materials Center that carries both run of the mill and exotic animals that can be used as live materials studies. They may even provide terrariums or aquariums to host the animal based on availability.
Grants
If you are at a district that does not have a live materials program, there are still options that you can explore to make a live material study possible. One way to get animals if your school or district cannot afford to provide you with them is Pets in the Classroom.org This is an organization that will reimburse you for pet supplies, animal and habitat if you apply for a grant.
Where to Buy...
There are also some amazing pet shops that will give you teacher discounts if you are purchasing an animal for your classroom. We like to use The Ark, Exotic Animals at 9795 McCombs st. in El Paso. They carry a wide variety of animals that would be perfect for an animal study in the lab, plus they give teachers a 10% discount. They do work with purchase orders if your district would prefer to open an account.
You can also purchase live materials through many Science supply companies such as Insectlore, Wards Science, Delta Education (Foss) and Carolina Biological. These are great places to order elodea (water plants) tadpoles, butterfly larva, bess beetles and other animals used for lab studies. These companies are also approved by Buyboard and may provide discounts.
Care Sheets
You can also find information care sheets for animals at the following websites:
Terrarium Recipe Cards
At Anthony ISD we have a small live materials center based on the EPISD model. We have had this center available to teachers for about 5 years and because we have such diverse conditions from campus to campus in regards to heating and cooling and other environmental factors, we have gotten pretty good at choosing animals that can handle different temperature conditions or are pretty hardy in a classroom environment. This is where the idea of coming up with recipe cards for terrariums and aquariums came from. Each terrarium recipe card will site a difficulty level (easy, medium and advanced) and will list the materials, temperatures and food you will need to get each terrarium started. These care sheets are written for beginners who are trying out live materials.
There are also some amazing pet shops that will give you teacher discounts if you are purchasing an animal for your classroom. We like to use The Ark, Exotic Animals at 9795 McCombs st. in El Paso. They carry a wide variety of animals that would be perfect for an animal study in the lab, plus they give teachers a 10% discount. They do work with purchase orders if your district would prefer to open an account.
You can also purchase live materials through many Science supply companies such as Insectlore, Wards Science, Delta Education (Foss) and Carolina Biological. These are great places to order elodea (water plants) tadpoles, butterfly larva, bess beetles and other animals used for lab studies. These companies are also approved by Buyboard and may provide discounts.
Care Sheets
You can also find information care sheets for animals at the following websites:
- Carolina Care Videos and pages: http://www.carolina.com/teacher-resources/living-organism-care-information/10849.co
- Wards Science Animal Care Sheets: https://wardsci.com/store/content/externalContentPage.jsp?path=/www.wardsci.com/en_US/teacher_live_materials.jsp&navAction=ext&navCount=6
- Foss Animal Care Sheets : http://www.fossweb.com/plant-animal-care
Terrarium Recipe Cards
At Anthony ISD we have a small live materials center based on the EPISD model. We have had this center available to teachers for about 5 years and because we have such diverse conditions from campus to campus in regards to heating and cooling and other environmental factors, we have gotten pretty good at choosing animals that can handle different temperature conditions or are pretty hardy in a classroom environment. This is where the idea of coming up with recipe cards for terrariums and aquariums came from. Each terrarium recipe card will site a difficulty level (easy, medium and advanced) and will list the materials, temperatures and food you will need to get each terrarium started. These care sheets are written for beginners who are trying out live materials.
To get started use these Tips and Tricks cards to help you prepare for the terrarium or aquarium that you would like to set up in your lab. Many of the the things described in the Recipe Cards will be explained in the Tips and Tricks PDF.
The following are easy to manage animals for your lab that are tried and true:
Now that I have a Terrarium, What Do I Do With It? Generate Questions: There are many lessons and experiments that you can do with live materials. One of the best ways to get started is to have your students generate questions about what they would like to know about the animals or environment. You get more bang for your terrarium buck if you let the kids drive the inquiry rather than providing them with the questions to investigate during the introduction of the terrarium into the lab or classroom. More often than not the kids will actually ask questions directly aligned to the standards you are teaching. Bundle your content standards: You can design a research project where students are investigating the animal while learning several of the standards you are teaching at the same time. Example: Have them research adaptations, life span, environment in the wild, predators and where they are in a food web or food chain. This list alone covers 5 content standards for 5th grade science. Change up the daily observations by providing guiding questions for the kids to investigate: The novelty of having a terrarium in the lab will wane after awhile and you really don't want your terrarium to become part of the furniture. The AIMS book Field Detectives is a great resource for questions that can be asked to students as they observe a terrarium over time. Not only does this book have great investigations and ways to create home made terrariums from materials, plants and animals you can get from a playground, but it also has terrarium cards at the end of each section that have wonderful questions that will generate curiosity of the terrarium long after its introduction in the classroom. We highly recommend this book! Safety: Safety is a huge concern for live materials, but just like any other investigation in a Science lab, the same considerations apply for live materials investigations as for regular investigations. Rule of thumb, terrariums are for OBSERVING and not necessarily touching, petting or holding. Kids (no matter what age) should never be left unsupervised with live materials. See the Tips and Tricks recipe cards for safety considerations. What to do with the animal after the investigation: As for the disposal of animals or plants after an investigation the rule of thumb here is to NEVER RELEASE LAB ANIMALS, INSECTS OR PLANTS INTO YOUR ENVIRONMENT. Many live materials can become invasive to a new environment (in other words, they can compete with or take over environments that belong to species of your area.) It is because of lab studies gone wrong in the end that there are some species of lab animals that are no longer available for purchase because they were released into the wild with detrimental results. This is a great topic of conversation with your students about changes to the environment caused by mankind. For this reason most live materials centers will pick up animals after the investigations have been concluded, but if you teach at a district without a live material center here are some ideas of what to do:
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Here are some teachers that took the challenge at the Live Materials 101 Training for the El Paso Science Network on July 8 & 9 at Tech2O!
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