How animals move: the human skeleton (BFSU B6)

Moving on from food webs and biomes, we talked more this week about adaptations, in particular the skeletal adaptations of animals like ourselves. We read a few books, we watched a Bill Nye video (a few times, actually), and we did a number of craft activities. The goal of the section is to learn why bones and muscles are important, and to gain a general idea of how they work and what they are made of. We also spent some time talking about the differences and similarities between a variety of mammal skeletons, looking for unique adaptations, and we spent some time talking about the names of our bones.

The Skeleton Inside You (Let’s Read and Find Out Science 2) (Philip Balestrino, 1989). I'm fond of this science series, and this book was no exception. They do a nice job of keeping the subjects accessible without dumbing them down, and usually the illustrations add a nice touch.

Look at Your Body: Skeleton (Steve Parker, 1996). From the guy who did the Skeleton books for DK, only this version, now out of print, is without many of the usual DK distractions. We did not spend a lot of time reading this book, but did really enjoy the pictures and illustrations in it.

The Skeletal System and The Muscular System (World Book Human Body Works, 2007). This book is full of information, more than we needed for our current purpose, but its related in short paragraphs with helpful photographs or illustrations, and specific topics are easy to locate. We did more reading in this book than looking, while we did more looking in the Steve Parker book above.

The Magic School Bus: The Search For the Missing Bones (Eva Moore, 2000). Although I've always believed the Magic School Bus picture books to be too full of distraction and noise to be truly useful, I'm finding that the chapter books are much better. Calvin seems to enjoy them as well.

Rattle Your Bones: Skeleton Drawing Fun (David Clemesha and Andrea Griffing Zimmerman, 1991). Just some good drawing fun to go along with everything else.

Bill Nye the Science Guy: Bones and Muscles. These videos are awfully busy, but Calvin enjoys them, and this one was pretty good, as far as they go.

The Body Book: Easy-to-Make Hands-On Models That Teach and Easy Make & Learn Projects: Human Body (Donald M. Silver). I picked up these two as ebooks from the Scholastic dollars days sale. They turned out basically to be simple but fun printable crafting activities that we enjoyed doing one afternoon. We used only one small section from each for our look at human skeletons, but there will be other parts in each that come in handy later, too.