I brought skin-related activities to P4-P7 at St David’s RC Primary school earlier this month. It was a fun and packed day.
I always felt that it’s a bit of a jump asking a kid to understand cross section from pictures in books. So, I made some 3D plasticine models of skin, with which the kids can do “sectioning” using palette knife. Once they have done that, the next step was to do “staining” by rubbing paint on either side of a piece of pre-painted watercolour paper. They were awing in surprise to see the image appearing after they have washed the ink off!
After thoughts
If I do this again there are a couple of changes that I want to make. Firstly, I will only do this again if I can make a mold and stamp from 3D printed models; making the plasticine models and staining slides took me a very long time. Also, I will bring in a unstained slide in the future, since the need for staining was probably not immediately obvious to people who haven’t seen tissue sections.
the Runaway Lab Book 