Skeletal System Sewing Cards

Science is one of those subjects, that we're on the fence when it comes to unschool or not to unschool.  I generally like to follow the children's (or my own) interests into explorations and experiments, but I also like to keep an undercurrent of structured study going at the same time.

To that end, last winter and spring, I had the children reading a science page a day from Dorling Kindersley's Knowledge Encyclopedia (known in our house as "The Great Big Book of Everything"), and then following up their reading with a BrainPop video to match, capped off by the accompanying BrainPop quiz (more to hone their study skills than to actually test their knowledge).

Picking up this fall where they left off last spring, they've been reading about the human body, and yesterday read about the skeletal system.

As a quick go-along activity for my younger girls (ages 9 and 10) I decided to put together sewing cards, by printing a couple of labeled diagrams of the human skeleton...

...gluing them to cereal cardboard, and punching holes through, here and there (clearly taking some liberties where bones form circles, or are very tiny)...

...for the girls to sew through with some of the glow-in-the dark yarn we picked up earlier in the summer (a double strand works best).

So they can see their finished work, with labels, when the lights are on...

...or without labels, when the lights are off.

They glow so much better than the picture shows, too.  I'm completely geeking out over them.