Human Body: Skeleton

My four year old is a very scientific little girl who is extremely interested in learning about the human body. We just started a fun little mini unit on the body- so prepare yourself for A LOT of posts on this subject!
You can't talk about the human body without talking about the skeleton. I mean, without it we would be a lump of squishy organs and skin! Ha! To get us ready for our skeleton learning journey I decided to make a child-size paper body chart.

At first I had great intentions of making separate body charts for each of the different systems- muscles, nervous, circulatory, digestive, etc BUT I decided as we learned about each system we would add it to just one paper body.
To make the paper body I traced my daughter on brown packing paper (thank you Amazon for shipping your products with SO much extra paper!!)
I searched online for a human skeleton cut out and was so thrilled to find this child-size skeleton printout. I had to make some adjustments- my daughter isn't quite that tall yet, so I shrunk the size a bit before printing. Due to size issues, I also had to add a different pelvic bone (found here), ribs (found here), and I ended up drawing a skull.

Skull opens to make room for the brain

Ribs open to make room for some internal organs

The ribs are cut open so I can insert different organs as we learn about them, and the skull is actually two papers taped together at the top so I can put the brain inside. I am super excited about how this project is turning out! We will be adding to this paper body as we learn about different organs and systems.

Putting the skeleton together was a family event- Boo is happily stirring juice while intently staring at the bones as we talk about them. And FYI: gluing bones on a body outline that is not a perfect match is tricky! 

We watched a School House Rock video on the skeleton, talked about calcium, and I printed out some X-Ray cards found at Chasing Marcus. We tried watching the Once Upon a Time series on the skeleton- not my favorite, but someone out there in the blogosphere might enjoy watching it.

Boo watching skeleton movies online--don't look too closely at my super messy desk!

For more skeleton fun- check out my blog post on skeletons- it is definitely Halloween-ish, but it can be educational! There is also a post on a glow-in-the dark skeleton game that was lots of fun.

Next post will be about the human brain!
Happy Teaching!

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