Dem Bones

OK, so it's deja vu with Emily's cold - we've progressed from snuffles and sniffles to a cough that's keeping her awake and making her sick. Sigh. Bronchitis mark 2, anyone?

Despite being clearly rather poorly, Emily's been remarkably cheerful all day, bless her. Emily and Jon spent the morning cooking and between them concocted a garlic and herb load, a cranberry and beer loaf, cherry rock cakes and Simpsons donuts. Yummmmm! Emily and I then went out (bad, bad, bad parent) to the doctors to collect presciptions for Grandad and Jon, and on to get cat litter and some more cat toys.

This afternoon Emily was desperate to start on her human body project, despite being poorly, so we gave it a go, with much success. The skeleton seemed a reasonable place to start, so we did. Emily used various books to research the right labels to go on a detailed skeleton printout, then we spent a long time talking about the different types of joints and she sketched them, coloured them and wrote about each type of joint and the kind of movment it allowed. She then had fun examining her own joints and trying to work out which was which type.

We moved on to looking at cubits (distance from elbow to fingertips), fathoms (outstretched arms), spans (of hand) and paces as units of measurement, measured each other's and had a whale of a time estimating various distances using those and then measuring them. Doesn't sound very much written down like that, but it filled two hours solid and we've only just started. Still to come in the next skeleton session we're going to:

Draw round Emily and paint a lifesize skeleton on the cutout
Examine a bone split in half lengthways with the magnifying glass
Draw a diagram of the inside parts of a bone
Assemble a cut out paper skull
Measure Emily's bones as accurately as we can
Make an x-ray collage
Do an experiment with the eternally useful home-edders bit of kit - loo roll tubes, lol - to show what makes bones so strong but comparatively lightweight
Research lots of randomly interesting facts about bones/skeleton (well, we did that today, really, but Emily's going to write the answers rather than just discuss them)

Phew, that should do the trick. Then we've got detailed plans for looking at muscles, skin and hair, blood/circulatory system/heart, respiratory system/lungs, teeth and digestive system, urinary and reproductive systems, all five senses, the brain and various other bits and bobs I've forgotten. We've got enough planned for at least two sessions on each of those, so that should keep us going for a while and nicely tick the science box for the time being at least!