Blowflies are important decomposers in the ecosystem and also can be used by forensic entomologists to help determine the time of death. This lesson plan asks students to interpret real data from an experiment that includes controls and treatments. The website also includes a teacher’s guide and grading rubric, but requires educators to request the teacher’s guide through email.
This resource is from DataNuggets, a fantastic series of lesson plans that are based on real-world research! Each Data Nugget comes with three student versions, based on the type of graphing skills required. Type A activities provide the graph for the students (allowing a focus on graph interpretation, making claims based on evidence, and explaining reasoning), Type B activities provide axis labels but requires students to graph the data, and Type C provides an unlabeled grid on which to draw a graph.
LessonHiveAdmin –
DataNuggets lesson plans are fastastic — they have real data for students to draw conclusions from. Each comes with different levels, so you can customize for your classroom’s abilities. In particular we love the scaffolding of the graphing and data manipulation. This nugget in particular will challenge students to interpret the results of the experiment.
It is very easy to do your own forensic experiments with chicken livers! However, make sure you have permission from your school before you put raw meat out and attract flies and maggots. It can be quite smelly.