Dissecting Flowers!!

Hello everybody!
I haven´t written a blog entry in a while, so I was elected to do it today. I just want to tell you all how much I love my seventh grade science class. They are my little brainiacs! We are covering plants right now, and I took them to the lab the other day to dissect flowers. I have one very sweet student in the class who, although it was homework for the students to bring in their own flowers, brought in flowers for the whole class! They had a great time studying their dissected flowers....they always surprise me. I expected that I was going to have the most difficult time teaching their class but 5th period, seventh grade science is my favorite time of day!
Brad and I are getting much more comfortable teaching with our limited resources and are trying to come up with some more creative ways to teach other than just lecturing and giving notes....which some of my middle school/ highschool science teachers did. I am excited to take some of my 8th grade science class to the planetarium since we are studying the solar system right now and we have very few resources to make a class about astronomy interesting.
Our latest picture is of the neighborhood watchdog in Jacaleapa, where Jeff lives. His name is Ranger and is one of the thousands of stray dogs in the city, but he actually protects their neighborhood. He is covered with fleas and ticks and only has 3 usable legs......one is crippled from a past encounter with a car, but they keep him around because he keeps the weirdos away.