No Bones About It, Science is Fun!

Well it is the last day of Christmas break for me and I cannot wait to go back to school. Is it weird that over the holidays I was missing my kiddos and wondering what they were doing? I am sure I have said it already this year but I love my class. They are fantastic and interesting!!! Of course they are not without their problems (no class is perfect after all) but they are so open to trying anything and they are respectful and encouraging to each other. Perhaps this is a rare thing these days as I have not had a class like this in a few years. Anyways I digress with their greatness…

Back to what I was going to start to write. We will be continuing with our study of the human body so I was looking up new books about bones, to bring into the classroom. There are so many to choose from so why is my classroom library lacking in this area….hmmmm Well I did some shopping this morning and this is what I ordered (All books about bones/human body except the Madonna box set. It was too good of a deal to pass up and my students love her books.).

We are having such a fun time learning about the human body and sometimes I let my class continue working on Science way longer than we should. I would teach Science all day long to them if I could. They didn’t want to move on from the nervous system and the brain and now they don’t want to move on from the bones. Here are some picture from what we have been doing in class.

Here are a couple of pictures of bones that I had on display for my class. The human bones are from the high school. I am told they are real but I am not too sure.  My class enjoyed looking at the long bones (see below for our in depth look at long bones) and identifying the spongy bone and the canals that run through the bones.

These are only some of the bones. I left the rest in the box so the table wouldn’t get too cluttered. My class wants to assemble the entire skeleton so I think I will set up stations around the classroom and one can be assembling the skeleton.

Along with the human bones are some animal bones as well. There are 2 small animal skulls in the second picture and 2 moose bones (brought in by a student) in the third picture. Can you spot them?

 Before we looked at the skeleton we read some facts about the bones in our text book and then had an in-depth look at certain bone types. Here is the anchor chart for the long bone. Students made a to scale model of one of their long bones from card stock and then we labeled and coloured it to match as we filled out the anchor chart.

They had fun making a bone that was the same length as theirs and then they compared bone lengths. It was great to see that when we looked at the real skeleton that they remembered aspects of the long bone from this lesson.

Here is the anchor chart from our lesson on keeping bones healthy. I divided my class into four groups (5 students each group) by putting the names of the minerals (Calcium, Vitamin C, Phosphorus, and Vitamin D)

in a can and students had to pull one out and find their partners.

There task was to research on the computer how their mineral helped their bones and what foods they could find the mineral in. Then they had to go through magazines and find the foods to glue on the anchor chart. One person from each group was to present their information to the class.

Next we are moving on to look at muscles and how the bones move. Exciting stuff happening in my classroom!!!!

If you have studied the human body in your classroom I would love to hear about what you have done. I am always looking for new activities to do with my class.

Cheers,