ingridscience

What are these bones? Who do they belong to? They are big! They are whale bones. (show blue whale vertebrae, grey adn right whale ribs and ear, sperm whale tooth, baleen)

If the individual bones are this big, how big is a whale?
Whales are bigger than us. Show the relative sizes of a person and an orca.
Some whales are very big. The museum I come from has a skeleton of a blue whale.
Is it bigger than us? Is it bigger than an elephant? Is it bigger than a dinosaur? It is the biggest animal that ever lived. (Show relative sizes of these animals).

Touch these bones. Are they heavy? What do they feel like? What do they smell like? (Show many bones that can be handled).

Where are your bones? Can you find your skull, vertebrae, teeth, ribs (same bones as the animal bones they are touching and seeing).
Show flipper X-ray and look at their own hand.

These bones have been cut so you can see inside them.

How do you think whales talk?
Listen to blue whale song.
What are they saying?
Can you sing their song?

You have learned a lot about the blue whale and other whales: how big it is, what it's bones inside are like, and how it talks.
Read Big Blue Whale.

Assemble the deer skeleton.

Ask students what they noticed about the skeleton that might give us clues about its life and what happened after it died.
Listed in probable order of events:
Probably had bad toothache before it died, as a molar is missing on one side. The gum would be rubbed by the opposite sharp teeth.
How did it die? Maybe got it’s foot stuck in a boulder, or broke it’s leg. Maybe it got an bacterial infection from the damaged gum. Maybe it caught a disease from another deer. Maybe attacked by a predator.
Missing lower half of a leg. Likely that another carnivorous animal took the leg after the deer had died.
Tooth marks on the skull. Small rodents scraped the last of the flesh away.
The bones were white when I found them. Beetles, worms, bacteria and fungi ate as much as they could.

Comic strip art - the story of how this deer died.
Either do a short comic strip, using the attached worksheet, as well as a larger drawing of the deer skeleton (see first photos).
Or make a longer comic strip of how the deer died and what happened to its body as it is recycled into other living things (see last photos).
In this more detailed comic strip, use tricks of graphic artists to show how fast events are happening. Some events will take a long time (e.g. the years of toothache, the slow decompostion of the body by bacteria and fungi) and some will happen fast (e.g. a predator killing the deer, the small rodents eating the meat from the bones).
Quote from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: “Each panel shows a frozen moment in time. Between the panels, our mind fills in, to create the illusion of time and motion.”
From experience we know about how much time has passed between panels (show two pairs of images in the centre of p.100). But the graphic artist can emphasize and lengthen or shorten the time between panels using some tricks: (page numbers from Understanding Comics and from Bone: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith):
1. Shape of the panel: Lengthen/shorten a panel to make more/less time pass. Understanding Comics p.101. Bone p.18, 36.
2. Use visual complexity in a panel or add dialog, so that it takes time for the reader to move through the panel, and there is a sequence of events. Understanding Comics p.95. Bone p.18, 49. With less visual complexity and no dialog, the reader will move faster through the panel, and time will seem to go faster. Bone p.98
3. Number of panels: draw two or more panels the same to show time passing. 'Pause panels'. Understanding Comics p.100. Bone bottom of p.41, 52.
4. Closure between the panels: widen/narrow the space between the panels for time passing slowly/fast/simultaneous events. Understanding Comics p.101. Bone p.93.
5. Border of panel: borderless panel gives a timeless quality. Leave border off top or run panel off side of page. Understanding Comics p. 102, 103. Bone p.26.