Teachers Maria Small and Dorie Collado recently held a successful Surgery Day event. They co-teach fifth-grade gifted students at Panther Run Elementary School. Small teaches language arts and social studies, while Collado teaches advanced math and science.
Although they teach different subjects, they are always working together to find creative ways to integrate the subjects to make learning fun and engaging. Through the end of the unit celebrations and Friday group projects, students learn to work cooperatively, share ideas and connect their learning to the real world.
Their latest end-of-unit celebration was a surprise “Surgery Day” that gave the students the opportunity to review what they had learned about the human body in science, while also reviewing important reading and writing skills, including using context clues and affixes, along with creative writing.
The students got to prepare for “surgery” by putting on lab coats, shoe booties, gloves, masks and “doctor” name tags. The students were amazed when they entered their classrooms and discovered that they had been transformed into “operating rooms.”
Once they were prepared for surgery, they got to start doing their “rounds,” which were their academic stations. They performed context clue dissections, transplanted affixes, reviewed the parts of the body by playing Operation and Human Body Bingo, created models and diagrams of the human body, learned interesting statistics about the human body by solving math problems, and even wrote a fictional story about their favorite food’s trip through the digestive system.
The students received a “Surgery Degree” and “Medical Bag” after completing their rotations.
