By Staff
Danville students learning CSI style
Special to the Enquirer
A crooked gray finger was the only thing a group of fifth grade students could see peeking out of the sand pile. Carefully, using only paintbrushes, the students began to uncover the human remains with a stoic CSI “professional” looking on. This was just one of the CSI peer-teaching stations that Danville High School anatomy classes shared with the fifth and eighth grade students from Danville Middle School. Other stations included determining directionality of blood spatter, skeletal articulation of the remains of a “burn victim” and finger print identification.
Every year Cinda Preuit’s science classes select a peer teaching project to do with a nearby school. This year the Human Anatomy with Forensics classes decided that they wanted to share their CSI experiences in forensics with about 221 Danville Middle School students. High school students brainstormed, selected and researched several activities. They then prepared and ordered materials that they would be using. Materials for this project were made possible by a Learn and Serve Grant in partnership with the Volunteer Center of Morgan County and an AASCD grant. Classes were divided into CSI teams…Able, Baker, Charlie and Eric. Each team was responsible for a specific teaching station. Middle school students rotated through each teaching station. Everyone got to spatter blood, lift fingerprints, dig up a buried skeleton and do blood transfers. The Morgan County Sheriff’s Department supplied fingerprint cards so each student could fingerprint himself while hearing about “Stranger Danger”. The fingerprint cards were then given to the students to take home to their parents. The finale was a walk through crime scene that changed from day to day where middle school students searched for clues to a body found in the trunk of a car; a stab victim in the library; a student found clubbed to death in a dumpster. All in all it seemed that all of the students and the teachers had a great time.