Two Girls, Two Elaborate Skeletons

This comes directly on the heels of Halloween, but it isn't really a "Halloween" activity, except that, you know, it involves skeletons and I got the idea from somebody else who was doing it as a Halloween activity. So okay, it's probably a Halloween activity, but we did it more in terms of human biology than Halloween.

So there you go.

Anyway...I was inspired by the skeleton puzzle over at Chasing Cheerios enough to dig out (after Halloween, of course) a really cool pdf of another put-together skeleton that I had downloaded and saved almost two years ago. Do you do that? See cool stuff on the internet and save it, even if you don't know when/if you'll ever do anything with it? I have an external hard drive, with something like a terrabyte of space on it, pretty much just for that and my itunes and my digital photography compulsion.

So two years ago I found this really cool skeleton pdf online, meant to be put together with brads as a Halloween decoration but pretty detailed as to its bones and stuff, and I saved it to my hard drive. And yesterday, I printed out two copies of that skeleton and gave it to the girls to color. The girls get really perfectionist and self-judgmental when it come to cutting, for some reason, so they made me cut all the pieces out. Which I did. I'll have to think about whether or not I should go cold turkey on the cutting assists in the future.

And today I got out some of my cheap stash scrapbook paper (I just remembered that I should have used my huge sample book of super-brittle wallpaper that I got from the Upcycle Exchange and that almost ruined my Cricut, it was so brittle. Shoot) and let the girls pick out pretty papers, then gave them glue sticks to glue the skeleton parts to the back of the pretty paper. While I cut that out (again), I gave them each a page on which I'd printed all five pages of that same skeleton all teeny-tiny on one page. They colored the teeny-tiny skeleton parts and I cut them out (ugh).

The girls arranged the big skeleton pieces, colored and backed with pretty scrapbook paper, sandwiched in the pockets of laminate, and we laminated them. Then, while I cut out those laminated pieces (definitely going cold turkey on the cutting assists), the girls glued their teeny-tiny skeleton to a new piece of cardstock, which we also laminated. Sydney made a lovely abstract arrangement of bones, but Willow made, as I encouraged her to, a teeny-tiny skeleton put together correctly to use as a key in putting together the large skeletons.

I had wondered if the whole fun of this activity would be in the creation, but the girls actually then spent quite a bit of time on the floor together putting together their skeletons. I had also assumed that each child would put together one skeleton, but I was pleased to walk by later and see that they were both working together on both skeletons:

And making them hold hands, no less, and go for a walk together.

Such friends that sisters can be sometimes.