A while back, Karen at Science Matters brought to my attention that the Kraft company was giving away brain-shaped gelatin molds for the price of shipping and handling only. I ordered one for us at the time, thinking it would be a good way to look at the brain in a 3-D format. Of course, it's by no means a perfect representation, but it can give us a decent idea.
Yesterday, I mixed up the gelatin and poured it into the mold. The directions and recipes that arrived with the mold give us instructions for how to make a gray brain (as well as various other colors), and I wanted it to be as realistic as a gelatin brain can be ;)
Here's how it looked, before the un-molding...
...and after the un-molding, here are a couple of different views:
(it actually looks a bit more purple than gray to me, but close enough, I guess)
We read part of this book together, and looked through the part that we didn't read.
(Lauren is reading the rest of it right now, on her own.)
We learned some very cool facts about brains and how they work with the nervous system. Did you know that your brain is "gooey, slimy, wobbly, gelatinous stuff which smells of blue cheese"? (p.2) I guess if you take out the smell factor, our gelatin brain isn't all that far from the reality!
We also read this book:
This book is SO COOL! It contains all sorts of facts about bones and skeletons, human and animal. The artwork in the book is noteworthy, in my opinion. It is simple, but it really gets the point across. Cut paper collage was used to create the illustrations, and the bones are placed on mostly dark background pages so they really stand out. Jenkins notes at the bottom of the pages the scale that was used to illustrate the bones. One of my favorites is a two page spread which shows the symmetry in a bull frog's skeleton by placing it precisely over the center of the book. There are lots of additional interesting facts about bones in the last pages of the book.
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