Where did my infant go?

Paging Dr. Hagy

Our family is coming to the end of our first year of homeschooling and it has been quite the adventure. There have been days where I felt lost, there have been tears from both my daughter and myself, and there have been times of enthusiastic breakthroughs.

My daughter is a very visual learner, and gets bored easily with repetition. It has been a challenge for me to constantly come up with new ways to keep subjects fresh, especially since she loves lessons that involve crafts.  I am not a crafty person. In fact, macaroni art makes me sweat--mostly because I keep thinking of all the meals I could be making with it instead of art. When I'm decorating a cake I feel like Picasso. Any other medium and I'm pretty much lost.

This week we are talking about how our bodies are made up of bones, muscles, etc., and this led her to become really interested in how x-rays work. I'm not going to lie, trying to explain x-rays to a five-year-old was hard. Especially since I had to do some homework on how it works just to explain it to her. Then she made it doubly hard by asking me to help her make an x-ray machine for her dolls.

I started the construction process by asking her what vision she had for it, and then explaining my vision for it. Together we looked around the house for items to use and came up with something that I thought was very clever, and I feel redeems my past lack of craftiness just a bit.

The X-Ray Machine For Dolls

One empty cereal box
Scissors
Tape
copy paper
doll size print out of a human skeleton
flashlight

Place the copy paper over the skeleton printout and trace as much of the skeleton as you feel comfortable tracing (the one I used was actually on the back of a larger poster and was quite detailed so I just traced the most prominent bones). Next cut a window section of the cereal box out tall and wide enough for the image of the skeleton to fit. Slide the skeleton drawing into the box with the blank side out until it lines up with window. Tape it into place. (We were out of plain white paper, so I had to use notebook paper.)

At this point we had Draculara "walk" behind the box to get her x-ray, (my daughter is at that stage where all her dolls stay naked. I'm not comfortable with it, but in this instance it helped illustrate the body).

 Then turned off the lights and shined the flashlight into the box exposing "her" bones.

It was a quick and easy craft that brought my daughter a great deal of joy! From there we talked about which bones various dolls had broken (Barbie had a riding accident involving Nightmare, Headmistress Bloodgood's horse from Monster High). Using play dough we formed casts, checked on her progress, and did further x-rays to give her a clean bill of health.

Not only did this get my daughter really excited about learning about bones, it also made her more comfortable with looking at skeletons without being afraid--lets face it, they aren't the nicest things to view.

In addition to being proud that I managed to come up with a cool way to talk about bones, it also gave us an excuse to empty the cereal box by making Rice Krispie squares.

It was a win-win for everyone!