Make no bones about it! As a STEM teacher, one of my favorite sites is Mystery Science! I’m so glad a fellow colleague and good friend introduced me to this site last year. I did my free trial last year and loved it so much I paid for the subscription to use with my students this year. Their lessons are fun and exciting, and the activities are full of engineering design challenges. This week’s lesson isn’t an EDC but it is a fun and creative activity that focuses on Life Science, bones in particular! Just in time for Halloween decorating!

This week’s activity is something new this year, one of their seasonal activities that was posted last week. In this lesson the students consider what we would be like if we didn’t have our bones. Then, as a fun activity, the students can draw their hand and arm adding in their bones. We are making a picture that looks sort of like an x-ray. We start by tracing our hand, wrist, and arm. Then Doug shows us how to draw our bones and color it in with a dark crayon, leaving the bones open. It looks better if you draw on a lighter background color of paper and press somewhat hard with the crayon really building up that wax. Next we dipped cotton swabs into a little bit of vegetable oil and brushed it into the bones. Letting our pictures dry bit. When you hold them up to the light or sun, the bones seem to glow. We can take them home and hang them in the window. I can’t wait to hang my picture up at home!

Glowing bones in the window

This activity was a hit with the students! They had so much fun painting with the oil and were so pleased with the results. This was a big boost to their confidence when they saw the finished product.