We began our study of the human body on the outside and worked our way in — as most Montessori learning goes! After learning all about The Outer Body, we moved on in to look at the skeletal system.
We began by examining this 3-D model of the human body — it was especially helpful for showing that the skeleton acts almost like armor for some of the internal organs.
Once we had played around with the model skeleton a bit, we looked at each bone individually using these free printable skeleton cards from Montessori Work Jobs.
Our favorite activity that we’ve been using throughout this human body study is this felt human body! It comes with the bones AND the organs, but we started with just the skeleton. The girls loved putting the skeleton together according to the labeled chart that comes with it.
The skeleton is life-size [for toddlers and preschoolers, anyway!], so we couldn’t resist putting the felt bones on our own bodies! N went first…
…and then of course L had to have a turn.
And that video needs no explanation!
Once the girls had mastered the felt skeleton, we matched each of the felt bones to the skeleton cards we had used earlier to learn their names.
We also returned to our 3-D human body model to examine the joints and see how they moved.
Now that we’re experts on the bones of the human skeleton, we put together this awesome human anatomy puzzle! The other side of the puzzle shows the circulatory system and internal organs, so we will be using it for our entire human body study. Our first puzzle arrived with a pretty glaring misprint, but Melissa & Doug provides excellent customer service and sent us a new puzzle very quickly!
We rely heavily on wonderful children’s books for all of our themed studies, and here are the books we used to study the skeletal system of the human body:
The Usborne Big Book of the Body
The Usborne Complete Book of the Human Body
Broken Bones, by Jason Glaser
Stay tuned as we continue to dive deeper into our human body study!
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