Science – investigating the human skeleton
In Science, Year 3 studied ‘animals including humans’, with a specific focus on the human skeleton.
The children began by learning that an adult skeleton is made up of 206 bones, and that a child’s skeleton has even more. They found it extremely surprising that the body contains so many bones, as this is something that is not represented in many depictions of skeletons. Following this, the children were challenged to name as many bones as they could and locate them on the body; they showed this by writing their answers on sticky notes and sticking them on the correct place on one of their team members. This generated many detailed discussions around common and scientific names for bones.
The children were taught the names of some important bones to learn about in more detail. Adapting the song ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ to “skull, clavicle, patella, metatarsals” was a helpful way of recalling these challenging names. They also focused on the rib cage, spine and pelvis, as these have particularly important functions.
Moving forward, the children learned the three main jobs of the skeleton: support (to hold us up), protect (to guard our organs) and move (the different types of joints help us to move).
In the final session, the children were set the challenge to test the hypothesis “Taller people have larger bones?” Each team of children chose a particular bone to focus on, including skull, spine and radius. They measured these bones for each person in their group and compared them to their heights. Importantly, the children were required to use their Maths skills to present and interpret the data, using base 10 pieces to represent the measurements in bar graphs.
