Students dissect brains, while expanding their own

While 10-year-old Mallory Troop dissects her first sheep's brain as part of Seeliger Elementary's gifted-and-talented program, she and 40 other students are learning life skills such as team work, problem-solving and critical thinking.

Not just that sheep's brains stink.

"It smells bad," said 8-year-old Rachel Machado.

"It's probably, like, the preservative juice," said Mallory, matter of factly.

And the fifth-grader is right. The distinctive smell of formaldehyde fills the Seeliger classroom, used Wednesday afternoon for the first Gifted and Academically Talented Education Exploration Program. All of Carson City's six elementary schools will conduct four of these gifted- and-talented student activities a year.

While the Seeliger students study sheep's brains, Mark Twain Elementary GATE students are linking literature and art after exploring the outdoors and Fremont Elementary students are practicing problem-solving.

Jacob Bertocchi, 9, was one of 18 Fremont students who devised a strategy to lower pennies to the floor using only a few selected items. The objective was to develop a new way to help people escape from a burning building.

His team used a long piece of string wound around a can of soup to lower the pennies, waded up inside a paper bundle, to the ground.

"They could get out with a strong enough rope if the building was burning," Jacob said.

The children are learning these skills year round in their schools, not just in these special programs, said Carol Harris, a facilitator of the exploration program.

"We cluster five to eight GATE kids within a classroom and the teachers try to challenge them even more within the classroom," she said. "This is the first year we're tried the GATE Exploration Program."

Harris said these new activities give the children opportunities to explore at a higher cognitive level. Students are tested for the gifted-and-talented program in the second grade. In grades third through fifth, Carson City has 218 GATE students.

The Seeliger students had to stay after school for another half an hour and have parental permission to dissect the sheep's brains. Mallory isn't grossed out by her brain.

"I did at first, but now I'm OK," she said before separating the two brain hemispheres apart with her probe. "I thought it was going to be a human-size brain."

Like many of the girls in the class, she is happy to hear from the instructor that the female brian has more folds, therefore is larger than the male brain.

"Size doesn't matter if you don't know how to use it," said 10-year-old Adam Peterson. For example, a bulldozer may be big, but it won't matter if you don't know how to operate it, he reasoned.

Adam used his scalpel to cut one section of the brain away from the other. He described the smaller posterior section as the "primitive part" of the brain, which controls movement, and the frontal "thinking part," repeating almost exactly what the instructor had said.

Adam is a gifted-and-talented student, but he's still a fifth-grader.

"It's kind of disgusting," he said.

• Contact reporter Becky Bosshart at bbosshart@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212.