With all our investigation ideas on the table, we agreed that we needed to actually look at real skin, muscle, and bones to help us figure out how they heal. While at the grocery store over the weekend, Mrs. Brinza was thinking about some students' ideas to use real body parts when students were asking for videos or asking a doctor's expertise. The chicken wing idea then came to her...why not use them? Maybe they could help us figure out more about skin, muscle and bones (knowing chicken wings have all these parts). After seeing the dissection, we agreed on the following:
While students were certainly seeing connections between the chicken wing and the boy's foot that started our whole investigation into healing, students unanimously were thinking that the chicken wing needed to be "broken" in order to really know more about the skin, muscles, and bones when they were damaged, as that's what wrong with the boy's foot, too. So we investigated a broken chicken wing and found some similarities and differences to the human foot:
All this discussion got us thinking about how the parts of both the wing and the foot seem to be very much connected, serving a purpose: to help the chicken move around or to help the boy move in whatever ways are necessary for him. And when we think of parts working together to accomplish something, we think of a system.
Looking back at our two years together, sixth graders thought of many systems we've tried to figure out various phenomena with, and boy, we were proud at all these systems we've figured out!
Looking back at our two years together, sixth graders thought of many systems we've tried to figure out various phenomena with, and boy, we were proud at all these systems we've figured out!
Between water distribution systems, ecosystems, our own public school system, and systems to explain population dynamics, thermal energy and a two-way mirror, we see how systems are at work everywhere. And so when students were asked if our bodies were a system, there was a resounding YES!