As Class 2 have been looking at the skeleton and muscles in science, our final art activity for the week was a cross-curricular lesson combing art and science. The class each made their own individual robot arms to demonstrate how our muscles flex and extend, working with our bones to move our bodies.
This art challenge was a particularly detailed and fiddly one, requiring the children to cut straws into tiny sections and secure them to a cardboard hand with tape. The straw sections represent our little bones that run all the way down our fingers and into the palm of our hands. The children then secured a piece of thick string to the tip of each finger and threaded them through each row of the straws, looping and knotting them at the bottom for their real fingers to go through. This enabled the crafted hands to be manipulated by the puppeteers. The manipulation of the string represented the flexion and extension of our muscles that pull and push our bones, and in turn, bend and straighten our fingers. The arms were fitted with strong cardboard straps to hold the children's arms securely in place, so that when they threaded their fingers through the looped strings, they could manipulate their robot hands in a controlled manner.
It took great levels of patience, skill and concentration for Class 2 to complete their robot arms, and not only did they all achieve this brilliantly, but some also had time to decorate the outside of their hands, personalising them into an aesthetically pleasing piece of artistic puppetry. The completion of the robot arms was where the science experiment began, using their constructed arms to pick up objects of various weights and sizes. Who knew science could be this much fun?!
