Learning About Vertebrates: Bone Collection

We love to heed Montessori’s urge to “follow the child” when selecting materials and topics to learn about with our kids.  This past spring, our oldest broke his arm — a supracondylar fracture of the humerus, which we learned is the most common bone break in children.  Unfortunate as this incident was, it sparked his interest in bones.  What are they?  What do they look like?  What do they do?  How do they grow and heal?  We found a wonderful children’s reference guide to vertebrates in our local library, and he has been eating it up!  Honestly, I’ve renewed it so many times, our kids probably forgot the library even owns it.

Pit Viper skeleton from Bone Collection: Animals

Snakes feature from Bone Collection: Animals

Bone Collection: Animals combines detailed illustrations of animal skeletons with beautiful full-color photographs to introduce children to twenty-one different types of vertebrates. See the pages on snakes above.  When we first got the book, my kids loved looking at the skeletons and trying to guess which animal they belonged to.  The bat looks like a dragon to imaginative young boys, by the way.  We’ve also been picking out different characteristics of the skeletons and talking about how well-suited they are to the body and lifestyle of the animal.  Elephants, for example, have enormously thick leg bones — aptly designed to hold up their considerable weight.  A cross-section of a bird’s bone shows how hollow and light they are in order to allow flight.  A platypus’s skeleton looks just as bananas as you would expect.  And on the snake skeleton, you actually can tell where the snake’s body stops and its tail begins.

One of our favorite features in this book is a two-page bone map of a lion, which gives both scientific and common names for bones (e.g. mandible vs. jawbone).  My son loved discovering that a lion has a humerus, too!  We have been using these pages to memorize bone names as well as to cross-reference with other types of animals.  (A snake, for example, does not have a humerus.  I hope you knew that already, but it was fascinating to my kids.) Of course, since this is a book about vertebrates, we’ve been looking at all of the skeletons and identifying their backbones.

Additionally, this is the first reference book my kids have spent much time with, so they are learning about how a table of contents, glossary, and index function, practical researching skills for the future.  I also learned that our library has about a dozen copies of this, so it’ll probably be sitting comfortably in our living room for a while yet.  We’ve got a few more bone names to learn.

Contents and Introduction

Glossary & Index

Have you discovered any gems at your library recently?  We’d love to hear!  Share them in the comments!