Te Papa Colossal Squid VC

I am cross posting this from our C4 blog as this was such a great VC. I highly recommend you book this for your students!

Today was one of the highlights of our C4 class when we had Diana-Grace Morris & Melanie from Te Papa join our class to talk about and show us the Colossal Squid. Diana told us the story of how the Colossal Squid was caught and came to be on display at Te Papa. We learnt about the anatomy of a squid as Melanie dissected a smaller version. This would be a great VC to do with our own squids & scapels in front of us.

Students can follow-up (or prepare for) this VC with hooking into the Colossal Squid Website and ask anymore questions on their blog there. Good question Lewis about what they are going to do with the Squid when it comes off exhibition. Given that the little squid in the dissection above was pretty stinky (thank goodness you don’t get the smells over VC imagine how stinky the colossal one will be!

This is a great website, you can engage in questions and discussions through the blogs linked from there and ‘play’ with the interactives. I really liked the build a squid interactive, not only do you learn about the body parts of a squid but when you have finished it you set it free and can check in later to see how big it has grown and what it’s been doing.

Do you know that as of today there are 1071 Squids named Squidward swimming around in the Te Papa interactive!! Here is my Squidward above.