Making an edible skeleton is a project that students will enjoy taking apart as much as they will enjoy building. Form the skeleton's bones using meringue, a delicate cookie made from of whipped egg whites, cream of tartar and sugar. To give students a helpful visual aid, provide a large-scale poster of a human skeleton as their model. To form realistic bones, instruct students to fill plastic baggies with their meringue mixture and cut a hole in one of the baggie's corners. They can then squeeze the mixture into delicate shapes, in the same manner as frosting a cake.
To teach third graders the scientific names for all the bones in the human body, challenge them to a "translation" project. Break the class into small groups and provide the printed lyrics for a song about bones in the form, "The head bone's connected to the jaw bone, the jaw bone's connected to the neck bone," etc. Tell the students that they need to "translate" all the names of the bones so that a medical doctor will understand the song. For example, they'll need to change "jaw bone" to "mandible" and "collarbone" to "clavicle." To complete the challenge, groups have to sing the whole song in its translated form.
Have your students re-create the form of the human skeleton in a dramatic life-size form that they can hang up to display. A simple diagram of the skeleton can serve as your guide, but use a photocopier to blow it up large enough to be of comparable size to your students' statures. Provide students with recycled cardboard boxes, yarn, scissors and the enlarged diagram to serve as their model. Working in groups, instruct students to cut individual bones out of the cardboard and use string to fit them together. At the end, hang the skeletons in the room with wire coat hangers.
Present the class with a model of a skeleton to introduce the subject of bones. Let students manipulate the joints between the individual bones. Working in groups, the students can then discuss the different ways that bones fit together and brainstorm ways of categorizing them into different types. After initial brainstorming, introduce students to the main types of joints between bones: ball and socket, hinge and gliding. As a creative extension, have the students work in groups to assemble working models of the different joints out of a range of materials, including cardboard, modeling clay, pipe cleaners, brads, string, newspaper and paper cups.