Bone Science

I just love our science this year!  Each year we have done with this company has been more exciting than the last.  I couldn’t decide if I wanted to finish the three-part series on zoology or if I wanted to change horses midstream to study anatomy and physiology.  My husband made the decision for me, which reminds me to go tackle him with a thank-you kiss later.

We have, so far, made a cell out of candy (my son remarked that his sweet-toothed sister possibly authored the experiment), experimented with boned and not-boned people, and run around with raw eggs to see the benefits of liquid cushioning for our brains.  We are also making a ‘personal person’ onto whom we will add systems as we study them.  It is all so exciting!

  We began our study on the skeletal system by making clay people.  It took some of us a little longer than others to get the people fully formed, but happily, they all fell down without bones.  Isn’t it lovely when experiments and demonstrations actually work out as planned?  Then we inserted our toothpick bones and tried to get them to stand.  Getting this part of the demo took a little more ingenuity.  Our people needed larger feet—which I believed comforted our big-footed boy.  We also got a unplanned-but-happy lesson on the fact that we call it a skeletal system.  They aren’t just bones standing alone. Without overlapping or otherwise joining the toothpicks together, the body simply broke at the ‘joints.’  It is neat when things like that work out.

 They ran around with an egg in a bowl that we sealed—so glad they include little steps like that in the instructions!  My daughter’s egg (brain) was actually frothy!  They did it again with the bowl full of water.  Now, if I actually read the instructions with a little more attention to the details, I would have noticed they said to use plastic containers.  So, our brains were a little cracked after the water run—but still intact!