I organized a trip with some other homeschoolers to the community college to see the human skeletons in the biology department. We also got to see a pig's brain, a cat's nervous system, a starfish, and models of the human eye, ear, heart, brain and the inside of a frog, a starfish, and some other cool things. E has an ongoing facination with anatomy and biology, so I knew she would love this. There were several real skeletons that had been there for 75 years, as well as a model skeleton that the kids got to touch and move.
I told the teacher that I had dropped out of her anatomy and phisiology class when I was 17, after trying it for 2 weeks. It was too hard to remember all those terms! But now that I'm learning alongside E, it's so much easier. Together we identified the ribcage, femur, carpals, metacarpals, tarsals, metatarsals, clavical, skull, patella, tibia, fibia, radius, ulna, and vertebrae. Some of them E remembered and others I helped her with. We saw a whale's vertebrae and I showed her the size comparison between it and a human vertebrae. We talked about the nervous system and how the eye and the ear and the brain work. She got to see the development of a real chicken, from egg to a chick ready to hatch.
Her favorite thing was the starfish. There was a real starfish and several models of the inside of a starfish. The teacher told us how the starfish turns it stomach inside out to grab it's food and then pulls the food inside it's body to digest it. E thought that was really cool, so when we came home, we looked for videos of the starfish eating. It was hard to find any good ones though. Most of the videos show the starfish from the top and we couldn't see what the stomach was doing underneath. I'm going to keep looking though and if I find a good one I'll post it.
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