Gingerbread Anatomy - New and Improved!

While I have made Anatomy gingerbread men before - see HERE, today was a totally upgraded experience.  I found an amazing activity online by Mr. Stephens where students create a clay gingerbread man, and perform surgery on him.  

I used this as a review of anatomical terminology before their midterm.  We all know reviewing can be very dry and difficult to get students interested in, and this hooked even my most reluctant students.


Here's an example of the instructions from his lab - "The patient's spleen was ruptured during the accident and needs to be removed.  Make a sagittal incision in the lateral portion of the left hypochondriac region.  Which organ must you move out of the way in order to locate and remove the spleen?  Suture the incision by drawing a short line with cross marks on it."


With something as simple as toothpicks, a plastic knife, and play-doh, my students were reminded of planes/sections, directional terms, and abdominopelvic regions.

There is a surgery documentation form where students record all their procedures, and at the end they must determine priority order if they were doing triage on the patient in the ER - bringing in those real life career connections.

They had a great time and were reminded of their terminology in a way that paper and pencil just can't compete with.

The Wonderful World of Task Cards

Toward the middle of last school year, I discovered the wonderful world of task cards.  Now, I'd been forcing my students to move around the room to review stations for some time - but this is much more effective.  Each card has a question and a number, and students can choose which questions they'd like to answer.  They're full color - with engaging graphics, and the students really like them.  Some even have QR codes, or ask students to perform artistic tasks like drawing, writing poetry, or inventing superheroes.

I've been particularly enamored with a few users on TPT, including Surviving Science, Bond with James, Brilliant Biology, and The Science Duo.

After having these printed in full color, and laminating them in the school library (thanks go to our AWESOME librarian), I can keep these for years to come.

My favorite thing to do has been separating them into six categories and pushing my tables into six groups with table tent category labels.  Students are required to spend a certain amount of time at each table and then rotate, recording their answers on notebook paper or the worksheet provided.

So today, when i couldn't find a set of task cards with enough detail for anatomy, I created my own.  The first set is about epithelial tissue types, and I'm working on one about connective tissue types as well.

I chose to make my cards a little smaller than some of the ones on TPT, so it takes less paper and laminating material to make them - although I'm still toying with the idea of making them bigger like the others I've seen.

I hope you give task cards a try in your classroom - they're such an effective strategy!