Elbows

Today we continued the science work we started last term on the skeleton and learnt about the elbow.

We heard that you only use 17 muscles when you smile but you use 43 when you frown! We tried this out and felt how different our faces felt. 

We heard about 'antagonistic pairs' which is when when one muscle works with another but in an opposite fashion. We have 206 bones and 650 muscles in our body.

We looked at how muscles make the body move using the website www.insideout.rigb.org.

And we looked at what joints look like in detail. 

Ligaments join bone to bone. Muscles make the joints move. We talked about being double jointed, what arthritis is and how important it is to warm up  and warm down before doing exercise. 

We then worked in pairs to make moving models of elbows.

We worked hard to follow our instructions independently!

The elastic bands show how the antagonistic pairs of muscles work - as one elastic band contracts the other relaxes and vice versa.

An interesting lesson!