Who says dogs are really man's best friend? At Park Forest Middle School, the seventh graders are expressing their love of rats. The science teachers at the school got the animals delivered from a local science center that produces young rats. All the rats are born with similar features, and the school received six young rats that happen to be sisters. Every rat comes directly from the lab with no exposure to the outside world. They are “made” in the lab, so some may experience heart disease for deficiencies. None of the rats carry diseases, and they are given to the school two weeks old.
The students are learning about what makes an experiment an experiment. The test on the rats are controlled by each group of students in the class. The students at the school must feed two rats milk, two rats water, and two rats sugar water. Each rat is given a tiny bit of their assigned drink, one cup of oats, and any fruit or vegetable.
Sadly, during the experiment, one of the rats passed away due to a heart disease, so the examination was thrown off task. To lighten the mood, teachers brought in a fake zombie rat to scare the students a bit. The experiment was also thrown off guard when a group gave a water rat milk. This might not seem like a big change, but the experiment is based off of the nutrients each rat is receiving. The rat was permanently changed to a milk rat and the results are dramatic.
The students are in charge of weighing their rat in grams, and measuring the tail length. As you would guess, the milk rats are the biggest, and to the teacher’s surprise, the smallest rats are the sugar water rats. The experiment gives the students a chance to connect with animals they do not see on a regular basis, and focus on a main question for their class, “How does an acorn become a massive oak tree?”
All of the students are looking at cells, and how one thing can drastically change another. Each weekend, a student is in charge of taking one rat home. There are more volunteers than you would think. All of the students want a chance to have one-on-one time with the rats. The rats are sweet, and the students love them just as much as the rats love the students. At the end of the year, the rats will go up for adoption and hopefully get a nice home where they get a lot of attention and care.