Hillsboro School Teacher Transforms Room Into Morgue for Creative Anatomy Lesson

Published September 15, 2016

Students at Hillsboro School got a spooky surprise when they walked into Brittany Rhinehart’s classroom on September 15 and saw their classroom transformed into a hospital morgue.

“We are studying the major bones of the skeletal system, so we have our own Hillsboro Hospital today,” Rhinehart, a seventh grade teacher said. “All the students are observing X-Rays so they can see the different type of bones and where they are in the body.”

The students danced to mysterious music while moving from station to station. They used a skeleton drawing to mark the spots they believed had been X-rayed.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” seventh grader Kathryn Kipley said. “We’re learning a lot.”

The hospital setting was put together in one day by Rhinehart, who said she came up with the idea to transform her room the night before while trying to think of a new, creative way to teach her students about the human body.

“This is my first year at Hillsboro and my first year in middle school, so I’m able to be a little more creative with some of these kids,” she said. “I honestly thought about it last night and wanted a new and creative way to teach them and make it interesting. We used balloons and PVC pipe for parts of the body then we cut out little cardboard feet so it makes it look like there really are bodies under the sheets.”

Changing the look of the classroom on such short notice was no easy feat. Luckily for Rhinehart, other teachers brought in sheets and materials to help make the room look and feel like a real morgue.