Backbone Model Lab Inspire Science Grade 2 Unit 1 Lesson 2

it's science time so for this module in science we have been talking about how animals body parts and things help them to survive we also this week have been talking about different ways to classify animals one way that we can classify them is whether they are vertebrates which means they have backbone or whether they are invertebrates which means they don't have backbone so in today's lab we are actually going to create model of an animal that does have backbone so that we can see how it moves and how that helps that animal to survive are you ready let's dig in for this lab you are going to need two things you're going to need some play-doh or clay and you're going to need something small and seed-like i'm using craisins because have lot of them but you can use something else you could use beans you could use rice you can use seeds whatever you can find around the house in pinch you could also just use more play-doh just make sure that the second color is rolled up into nice little tiny balls about the size of peas or craisins or seeds or sunflower seeds but that's all you're going to need for this lab i'll give you few minutes to get what you need our first step of our lab is always safety so make sure that you are not putting any of the lab materials in your mouth even if they're edible like seeds or raisins or cranberries because once it touches the play-doh sometimes the play-doh can have things inside of it that are not good to go inside of you okay so we want to make sure we're not putting the play-doh in our mouths once we start handling materials we want to make sure that we're not touching our mouth not touching our face and of course we want to protect our eyes so if you have your science goggles go ahead and put those on all right so now our first step in our lab our next step is going to be making our first model so we're just going to take the our first block of play-doh and we are going to make model of an animal it can be whatever animal you want as long as it has backbone let's get sculpting so the animal that chose to sculpt is cat it's not the prettiest cat but i'm teacher not an artist they are my favorite animals they are vertebrates they're in the feline family and they are just so so cute so now that we've sculpted our animal it's time for us to move to the next step so we're going to take our either our pieces of clay or we're going to open our rice or craisins or raisins or seeds or whatever we're going to be using to model those backbones and we are going to place them along the back of our animal so these little pieces are going to model or represent the bones in the backbone of that animal so we're just going to place them in the back and make sure they're not overlapping they're not right on top of one another i'm going to get different one that one's kind of sticky make sure they're not right on top of one another because real backbones are not like that they kind of have little bit of space in between them so i'm going to put little backbones all down the back of my animal and didn't use my model is not very big don't have lot of play-doh so my model is not very big so it's not going to take me very many to create this model of the backbone so now we have model of kind of where the bones are in that backbone we're going to kind of push them in little bit more and we can see how that bone structure is okay so now we are moving on to one of our final steps of our experiment today and that is to kind of move our animal around so we wanted to use play-doh or clay or something flexible so that we can kind of move the animal and see just how the backbone is moving when they do certain things so like for example if the cat were running you know we would see the backbone kind of moving as they run sometimes cats like to sit down and kind of curl up they kind of sit down like that and kind of curl up in their back you know and sometimes sometimes with cats you'll see them they'll get when they get really upset they'll kind of arch their back and kind of they'll kind of arch their back and their back will pop up like this so we can kind of see how the backbone moves as our animal does so here is our question for our lab after making our model and kind of seeing how our animal moves how do you think that backbone helps the animals to survive hey noodles you got new friend yeah so i'll give you guys some time to clean up your lab materials and get your worksheets filled out and be ready on the lookout for our science exit ticket for today hope you enjoyed our lab love doing labs with you guys until next time keep it sciency