Hilltop students study a lamb's heart

SPARTA — Every October there is a science class at Hilltop Country Day School that spends some time studying the circulatory system. This study includes dissecting a heart.
It is the 4th grade.
The hearts are lamb hearts. Sheep have a four-chambered heart, just like humans. By studying the anatomy of a sheep’s heart, they can learn about how their own blood pumps through their body and keeps them alive. The students, in groups of three, and carefully guided by their teacher, Mr. Umstead, pick up the lamb heart and explore before cutting. They feel the weight of the heart muscle and observe the hard, yellow fat around it (these are well fed lambs).
They make conclusions about living conditions and heart health. They will put their fingers into the various cavities formed from the aorta and other major blood vessels. What does the outside structure of a heart tell us about how it works? What secrets are inside? Where do the major blood vessels go? How are they connected inside? In short, they are doing what children do best: exploring - and this is the key to effective learning. Their collective imagination and curiosity is on fire.
By the time Mr. Umstead is guiding the students on how to make the precise cut to reveal the inner chambers of the heart the students are so excited that they are intently focused on what will be revealed.
They all have many questions that only cutting into the heart will answer. As they cut into the tissue each student experiences the strength and toughness of muscle fibers for themselves. They see first hand the thickness of the chamber walls and discover how the major blood vessels are intricately connected to a heart chamber in a way that no worksheet or illustration can convey. They will discover how large each chamber is and how they are connected to one another. During the dissection, each group will take photographs of the heart as a record of what they found.
One of the many activities that follow the dissection are prompts challenging the students to identify the chambers and major vessels of the heart from pictures of their own dissected lamb hearts, referring to simple medical illustrations to help them. Afterward they look forward to the 5th grade when they will be dissecting eyeballs as they learn how the eye perceives light and color.