Cow bone observation lesson

Hi! Future Ticia 2024, I’m updating our old science lesson to make it a bit more useful now for you than just, “Wow, this was such a fun lesson!” This was part of our Land Animals Unit (oops, I don’t have that post written yet), and in particular the smaller Farm Animals Unit. I’ll be popping in from time to time to interrupt Past Ticia 2011 with more thoughts.

I now return you to past Ticia 2011

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I dug this up out of my drafts because I didn’t have time to write the post I intended for today. It’s been one of those weeks. Unbelievably busy.

I’d wanted this to be further away from our chicken bone experiment, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles, so to speak.

So, every time we eat steak my boys ask if they can have the bones and give them to Mimi’s dog.  They’re always very disappointed in the answer that we didn’t buy a steak with bones in it.

And then they’re even more disappointed to find out that most bones from cows are not okay to feed dogs because they splinter.  Oh the horrors and cruelty that we won’t give the dogs a bone, they cry in pain in anguish.

Okay, that last sentence might be an exaggeration, but they are disappointed.

Preparing for the cow bone observation lesson

So, finally one day we ate a T-bone and I saved the bone.  I boiled all the meat off to get to just the bone, and then washed it off.  Yes, I suppose I could have let them handle the bone just as it was after we ate the steak, but after their problems with following directions on sanitation before and having to wash throw out toys……..

Future Ticia 2024 will also add you can buy stew bones, which are whole bones with a little bit of meat on them, that you can use to make bone broth that is available at most grocery stores. You will be able to observe different things with that.

Cow bone observation lesson

Then we observed the bone.  Here are their comments:

• Batman: “It’s rubbery.” describing the sides, and for the top, “It’s rough and it’s shaped like a Y.”
• Superman: “It’s smooth.” for the sides, and for the top, “It’s like sandpaper.”
• Princess: “It’s slippery and rubbery,” for the sides, and the top “is scratchy.”  A lot of things are scratchy right now.

It’s a fun simple science activity.  I tried to draw out their descriptions, but they weren’t interested in describing it more, mainly they were trying to figure out what kind of bone they could give to a dog because “dogs like bones Mommy.”

Don’t you just love simple activities like this?

Extending the cow bone observation lesson

This part is all Future Ticia 2024, and I’m actually realizing this is from before we studied land animals, we were studying Swimming creatures during Kindergarten, and Land Animals in 2nd grade I think.

But the kids and I studied and observed our cow bone before they could write and before I really thought to have them make a nature study notebook. So here are my suggestions for extending this lesson:

• no matter what age your child is, have them sketch out what they see
• if your child is older, have them label the different parts of the bone, or try to figure out what part of the skeleton the bone is from (model of a bone)
• write down their descriptions of what they observe
  • this could be a great way to work on five-sense writing and make a great writing assignment. What does the bone feel like? How does it smell? It is possible to taste it (if you feel brave).
• compare a cow bone and a chicken bone (we did later on work at Comparing bird and mammal bones but I didn’t have that ready that day)

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