Yuck! The Owl Pellet Lab
An advocate of inquiry science, Samina presents her famous Owl Pellet Lab lesson plan. She uses it with middle school students, but it is successful with students at the high school and college levels as well. The title, “Yuck! The Owl Pellet Lab,” precedes the cries of delight as students carefully dissect and gather data on owl pellets (vomit). Samina says: “I show the video clip from Dirty Jobs about owl pellets before the students dissect the pellets.” The video is available here. The attached PDF includes all you need for the lesson (except the pellets).
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Born in Ethiopia and raised in Nigeria, 2008 Golden Apple award winner Samina Khan was always fascinated and intrigued by nature. "I had the craving to discover things and an uncontrollable urge to get to the depth of how things work and why." At first she thought she wanted be a doctor, and Samina was admitted to one of the best universities in Nigeria to pursue that goal. "But fate had something better in store for me,” she says, “to be able to mold the future of our children." In 2001, through the Chicago Public Schools' Global Educators Outreach program, Khan, who is fluent in five languages, joined the staff at Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet School to teach International Baccalaureate Middle School science. Since joining the faculty, the number of students passing the Illinois Standards Achievement Test in Science skyrocketed from a low of 27 percent to nearly 90 percent in 2007.