In this video segment from Teaching Middle School Life Science, teacher Tracy Polte talks about experimenting with live animals in her fifth-grade classroom. She explains why she thinks working with animals is valuable for her students, the precautions she takes to ensure safe conditions, and why she thinks it is important that students relate experiments like this one—measuring the speed of crayfish—to something in real life. Polte later reveals another aspect of her teaching style, which encourages students to come up with their own experimental questions, materials, and methods for collecting data.