Australia's Science Forum

does anyone have any great but easy ideas for dissection labels. I provide tiny laminated names on a pin which either get thrown away or rust when I wash them giving rise to a tetanus risk . all suggestions welcome

I have used toothpicks and bamboo skewers cut down in length.

I give the kids toothpicks & long sticky labels, & they make 'flags' by wrapping the label around the toothpick.
They just go in the sharps container at the end of lesson.

do you print the labels for them? I'm just trying to save a bit of the time I spend making the fiddly little things.

In 14 years I have never been asked to make labels for dissections

I give them sheets of regular wide address labels, so they can fold them in half around the toothpick & have enough space to write.
I also give them cheap pencils with dissections, so they don't use their own. The pencils go in the clean-up bucket with the dissecting gear, & get sterilized & dried in my glassware dryer.
The kids write structure names on the labels, stick them in the heart/fish head or whatever, & the teacher walks around & marks their accuracy.
I don't print the structure names on the labels, because they're supposed to figure out what's what for themselves. Plus it's a little more entertaining when you see a label with "Aorca" written on it! I said "you're dissecting the heart from a sheep, not a killer whale" but he didn't get it.

fibreweb wrote:In 14 years I have never been asked to make labels for dissections

Me either not in 18 years I'd hate to see what some of our darlings would write.

My kids just label a sheet of paper with a diagram on it. Maybe seniors label theirs sometimes though now I think of it.