Next Investigations: Zooming-In

Now that we've figured out a bit more about the skin, muscles, and bones, we're seeing something:

1.  Skin is connected to muscle pretty securely.  It was super hard to remove!
2. Muscles are connected to both the skin (duh, see #1) and the bones.
3.  Bones are underneath both the muscle and skin (depending on location).
4.  Skin constricts the range of motion of parts of the body.  Once it's removed, the muscles can extend farther.
5. Break a bone?  Forget about it.  The range of motion gets all out of whack.  Parts that fluidly moved before hand look wobbly and sloppy.  Yikes!
6. There's blood inside the bones. That's weird--we didn't expect that!

So we wanted to know more and decided we should return back to our investigation ideas.  Many students wanted to use images like x-rays or other imagine simulators to help us figure out more!

Since we're still in hybrid learning, getting our hands on x-rays was tough, but Mrs. Brinza scored some medical imaging.  We looked at both x-rays and MRI images, and discovered the MRIs gave us WAYYYYYYYYY more details, however, we weren't medical experts and couldn't really tell what was what.  So we looked at some scientific drawings to see if we could figure out some parts on the MRIs, and we sure could!

With both the MRIs and the scientific images, we saw something that stood out to us. There are blood vessels in not just the bones (remember we saw blood in the busted chicken wing bone), but they're also in our skin, and our muscles.  Just what do blood vessels do?  What does blood really do?  What does it even look like up close?

We had all these questions about blood, so we turned to using a "zoom-in" investigation request, also scientifically known as using a microscope!  We saw some pretty incredible things with our virtual microscopes:

We're starting to see just how important blood is!  The  plasma has both water and food particles in it.  The platelets help with clotting and scab formation, while the white blood cells help fight off infection.  The red blood cells carry oxygen.

So if blood vessels are found all throughout the body, blood has to be really important, right?

We also read about blood to see that it actually is a mixture comprised of plasma, platelets, white blood cells, and red blood cells.

But it's not the only important thing, as nerves are found in the skin, muscles, and bones, too!  So we looked at nerves under the microscope, too!

Nerves looked way different than the round red blood cells (which are round to help with moving efficiently around the body).  They have these long branches (similar to branches on a tree or roots in the ground).  We also read about nerves to see how they are important in sending messages to our brains for both voluntary (somatic) actions and involuntary (autonomic) actions like breathing. 

So now that we've looked at two parts of the skin, muscles, and bones under a microscope (nerves and blood), what would we see if we looked at the actual skin, muscles, and bones?  What would they tell us about the body?  How could looking at them up close help with better understanding the healing process?  Especially since so many of us have gotten injured and it takes time for things to get better.  This process is fairly slow, but how exactly does it happen?