The Traveling Spark Station – Bones of the human body for kids

by Mary Ann on April 18, 2011

paper bones picture

Home made bones!

I spent the weekend in Arizona at the HIP Women’s Retreat. What fun! So the Spark Station and grandma school went on the road a bit early last week.

Now it is important to remember the age group I am working with. There are 4-6 children all under the age of 5. So in my Spark Station there is only one topic offered with lots of possible activities. They all like to play and learn and work together so most often we just do one thing at a time out of the Spark Station offerings.

This week we learned about the bones in the human body.   We played a bone identification game. We tickled our rib bones, our neck bones, our back bones and our hip bones. That was a laughing good time.

human skeleton picture

Human skeleton

We talked about the difference between our skin and our bones. Our bones hold us up and our skin holds us together. Our skin is soft and our bones are hard. Our skin can tear but our bones can break. We talked about how we can keep our bones healthy and strong.

We did some activities to learn about bones. We took large pieces of paper and traced everyone’s body. Then we added the bones in our head, spine, legs, arms, hips and chest. Hanging the bodies was the most exciting part. We made a Q-tip skeleton.

sketch of human skeleton

Jack’s bones, Maggie’s bones and Mary’s bones

We read three wonderful books about what we can do with our body. One book talked about how many fingers we have. Another book was about running. Another was about eating. You can’t eat well without a jaw bone!

Wonderful books on anatomy with large colorful pictures from the library would be great. In my Dover file, where I store free coloring pages and worksheets, I have some great anatomy pictures to color like the hand below.

skeleton with Q tips toilet paper tubes picture

Skeleton with a. Q tips b. Toilet paper tubes

If you save ahead of time you could make a skeleton out of toilet paper tubes. Check it out here:  Toilet paper roll crafts

Share these fun facts about human bones with your children:

  • The human hand has 27 bones; your face has 14!
  • The longest bone in your body? Your thigh bone, the femur — it’s about 1/4 of your height. The smallest is the stirrup bone in the ear which can measure 1/10 of an inch. What do those measurements look like on a ruler?
  • Did you know that humans and giraffes have the same number of bones in their necks? Giraffe neck vertebrae are just much, much longer!
  • Have you ever thought about the number of joints in the human body? You have over 230 moveable and semi-moveable joints in your body.
hand bone muscle diagram

Hand bone muscle diagram

Try making some bones yourself out of newspaper and tape. I found these wonderful pictures on the internet.

paper bone picture

What a great bone!

bone with paper masking tape pic

newspaper and masking tape

 

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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

tionna April 14, 2014 at 2:17 pm

i get it

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