Fish Bone? Fish Heads?!?

One of the techniques discussed by Dr. Bennett is the use of Fish Bone diagrams to help students develop specific concepts. Below is a fish bone template borrowed from an elementary teacher in our district. My only concern with this diagram is that "Am I telling my students how many headings I want?", "Am I taking away from their learning experience?".

Because of these questions, another teacher and myself edited the original template (we just removed the bones). This allows students during a Think/Pair/Share with the class to develop as many headings as they see fit for a specific concept. This new template ca be seen below:

And lastly, to help students here is an example of a completed fish bone.

The above information has also been placed inside of a smart notebook file (see attached file to this post) to help guide students through the process of using a Fish Bone Diagram to discovering "Separating Mixtures" as seen in Unit 1 Topic 3 of Grade 8 Science in Alberta. As well, here is a mini lesson guideline that shows our basic implementation of this idea:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddmqct2t_265dt8mbmf5

And lastly, lastly, to get myself and my class ready to try and implement Fish Bone Diagrams for concept attainment in Science 8, I found this old 80's video by Barnes and Barnes... ENJOY...