Learning about the Skeletal System
I gave Bug a broken arm for Christmas.
Well, I gave Bug a toy with wheels which led to a ton of outside playtime (the South does NOT have winter y’all) which led to an emergency room visit over the holidays.
Yeah, I am basically the best mom ever.
We pulled out one of our favorite Human Anatomy books and learned
- We have 206 bones in our body (trying to memorize them in nursing school was no joke)
- The Skeletal System has three important functions (supporting your body, protecting your organs and creating blood cells)
- What bones are made of
- Ligaments and joints (and how they work)
After reading all about bones, we jumped into some hands-on activities. First, we checked out Bug’s x-rays from his broken arm. He fractured both of the bones in his arm when he skidded off his bike. He has a buckle fracture, which, as the doctor explained to him is kind of what would happen if you took a stick of cold butter and then jammed one end of it into the counter. Smush.
Then, we pulled out an x-ray set I had laying around, and I challenged the kids to see if they could assemble the skeleton from the x-rays. We compared Bug’s broken arm to the images of a healthy arm, and both had a laugh over just how mangled his arm looked in comparison.
After that, we played a little with Mr. Skeleton (one of my favorite halloween decorations, who is, admittedly, not anatomically correct- but good enough for this homeschool momma to make a point) and checked out his joints and how they moved.
If you want to use a curriculum to cover human anatomy, check out Apologia’s Human Anatomy. The curriculum went over all the various types of joints and after seeing what we could see on the model, Bug spent some time feeling his own joints to consider how they worked. He completed an assignment in the curriculum where he needed to identify different kinds of joints, and drew a model of his own skeleton.
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