These activities are good for teaching about the life cycle of the skin, its makeup and its components. Sixth-graders are beginning to get pimples, so ask your students to come up with a list of questions about acne: what causes it and how to alleviate it, for example. Another activity involves dividing the class into three teams: Team Epidermis, Team Dermis and Team Subcutaneous Tissue. Assign each time the task of learning about its skin component and teaching the rest of the class.
To teach your students about the deeper scientific qualities of skin, play a game called A Day in the Life of a Skin Cell. This involves writing a story as a class to illustrate the way that skin cells change over time. So, have the students name the main character of the story (a skin cell). The skin cell begins as a baby, where it has thicker fat layers and thinner epidermis. Ask the students to think about how this affects its life (at school or at home, for instance). As the skin cell grows up and loses its fat, it becomes thicker, but more vulnerable to outside factors such as the sun. Trace this cycle together all the way to old age.
If you want to integrate a lesson in skin into an art class, try having your students make a replica of their own "skin" using construction paper. Allow them to draw any scars or marks that they have on the model and, if there is time, to write a short paper describing how they get these scars. Alternatively, ask students to consider how they would redesign the human skin if they could. Would they make it thicker? Would it be fire resistant? Would it have gills for breathing underwater? Allow students to draw what a person with this new skin would look like.
To teach students about the effects of sunlight on skin, have each student place a dark piece of construction paper on a sun-facing window. Over the course of a month, get the students to track how much their piece of paper fades each day. Have them make a chart tracking the fading. Alternatively, ask your school to buy UV-changing beads, which change color under sunlight. Go outside with the students and allow them to notice the effects of sun on the beads, and let this lead to a discussion on skin safety.