Skeletons Teaching Theme Activities & Lesson Plan Ideas

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Literature

Dem Bones by Bob Barner
Shake Dem Halloween Bones by W. Nicola-Lisa
Skeleton Hiccups by Margery Cuyler
The Skeleton Inside You by Phillip Balestino
Funny Bones by Janet and Allen Ahlberg

Poems/Songs

Bones
(to the tune of “Home on the Range”)
Oh, give me some bones
That are sturdy as stones,
That connect from my head to my toes.
My bones help me out,
Help my body about,
They protect it wherever it goes!

Chorus: Bones, bones hard and strong,
All connected so nothing goes wrong.
My bones help me out,
Help my body about,
Bones protect me as I go along!

The bones in my spine
Help me stand up just fine,
While the bones in my ribs guard my heart.
The bones in my hips
Let me sit or do dips.
Without bones, I would just fall apart!
Chorus

The Bony Hokey Pokey

Put your right phalanges in,
Put your right phalanges out,
Put your right phalanges in
And you shake them all about.
You do the bony hokey pokey
And you turn yourself around,
That’s what it’s all about!

Repeat for left phalanges, pelvic bone, cranium, etc.

X-Ray
by Joan Horton

“This is your x-ray,”
Said young Doctor Jones.
As he held up a picture
And showed me my bones.

My eyes opened wide
At this curious sight…
It looks like I’m ready
For Halloween night!

Being a Skeleton Isn’t So Easy

Being a skeleton isn’t so easy
When wintertime comes
And the weather gets freezy.
It shivers my bones
From my front to my back:
I shake and I rattle,
Click, clickety-clack.

Click, clickety-clack,
Clack, clackety-click,
Somebody throw me an overcoat—
Quick!

Science

Bone Hunters

Put Dem Bones in a water table filled with corn meal. Provide sifters and let the children sift for bones. Make a model skeleton by gluing the Dem Bones candy pieces to cardstock to form a skeleton body. Place this model close to the water table so the children can refer to it as they sift for bones. Then they will be able to assemble their bone pieces to look like the model–one skull, one chest, two arms, two legs, two hands, etc. Once they have found all the parts they need, they can go to their tables and glue their skeletons to cardstock.

Life-Size Skeleton

Use the overhead projector to enlarge a skeleton blackline to average kindergarten child-size. Trace it on white poster board, cut it apart and write a capital and lower case letter on the joints that match. Assemble it with brads. They like putting it together and holding it up to each other to see how the bones fit. (Your could “cheat” by buying a plastic jointed skeleton at a party store and taking it apart.)

Bone Tracing

Give each child a surgical rubber glove and have them place it on the hand they do not write with. For younger children, tell them to draw a line from the tip of their finger to the first fold, then from that fold to the second fold and then to the palm, For older children, give them a black marker and have them feel their bones and trace them. They look like their own personal hand x-rays.

Animals with Skeletons Book
Find pictures of animals and their skeletons. Copy the skeletons on transparency film. The children can match the skeleton to the correct animal body. You can cut apart the transparencies and place them in order over the animal pictures to make a book.

Outlines

Copy an outline of a person on one side of a paper and a skeleton on the back side of the paper. (They have to be aligned one behind the other.) When you hold it up to the light, you can see the bones inside.

Mirror X-Ray

If you have one of those tall housekeeping mirrors, you can project a skeleton onto it and trace it with a dry-erase marker. When the kids look into the mirror, they see the approximate location of the bones in their own reflection.

X-Ray Investigation

Look at real X-rays.

Skeleton Pieces to assemble

Ben & Jerry’s Archived Skeleton Printable

Art

Q tip skeleton

Q-tip skeletons and Skeleton Stories

Pasta Skeleton

Dog Bone Skeleton
Paint small dog bones white and then the children glue them to black paper in the shape of a skeleton.

Milk Jug Skeleton

Math

Dem Bones Candy counting, sorting and graphing
A graph can be found in the Oct/Nov 2003 Kindergarten issue of The Mailbox magazine.

Dem bones sorted by color

Dem Bones sorted by shape (bone types)

Dem bones graphed

Other

Skeleton Fries

Boil a small potato for 25 minutes. Let it cool. To make the skull, peel the skin from the potato and press in 2 cloves for eyes, 2 peppercorns for nostrils and 4 peppercorns for teeth. For the bones, use either baked frozen french fries or potato sticks.

Skeleton Game

Skeleton Game
This game is similar to Roll-a Snowman. Students roll a die to accumulate skeleton body parts and assemble a skeleton.

Hidden Skeletons

Announce at the beginning of the morning. There are “20” skeletons hidden in our room right at this moment.. and they are alive. The kids search and search before they realize that it is them.