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A hands-on look at animal anatomy

Local students travel to university to dissect chicken hearts

By: Laurent Bonczijk
Published: 1/24/2012 6:58:00 PM

Students from Veritas School visited the George Fox University campus for a special treat last week: They dissected chicken hearts and took a close look at them through microscopes in one of the school's laboratories.

"I like finding out how things work," said Takumi Kammerzell, 11, a student in Brittany Watilo's sixth-grade class.

This year's science curriculum is human anatomy and students learn in-depth about the skeleton, the cardiovascular system, eyes, ears, etc.

"The lab we just did was for our cardiovascular unit," Watilo said.

Students who had looked at drawings of hearts and plastic models were able to look at real ones up close.

"It was different than what I'd imagined," said Courtney Zurcher, 11, of her dissection experience. "We cut them open and we looked at the valves and the chambers under the microscope."

The students also looked at three human hearts, although they didn't dissect those. "They had an example of a smoker's heart, it was huge and black and it looked swollen," Zurcher said.

"It was really charred on the inside, too," Kammerzell added.

They both said they were amazed that the smoker had been a 140-pound man while the healthy heart of a 220-pound man had was much smaller. Kammerzell noted that the smoker's heart was much harder, too.

Watilo said she takes her students to Fox once a year to use their lab facilities and that she tries to hold one science experiment every week. George Fox also has a loaner program which enables her to bring high-quality anatomic models to her classroom. She praised the partnership: "It isn't common that kids at this age get to do that."

The partnership is not only educational but fun. "This year also, we got to borrow bones from George Fox and make a body. It was real fun," Zurcher said.