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Lab Activity: Skeletal System

This document provides instructions for a lab activity where students analyze a chicken bone to learn about the skeletal system. Students will remove meat from a chicken wing to observe ligaments and cartilage. They will see that chicken bones resemble human arm bones. Examining the interior of bones reveals red bone marrow. The experiment then tests how vinegar versus water affects bones by soaking separated wing bones for days, with the expectation that vinegar will dissolve calcium salts and weaken the bone.

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90 views2 pages

Lab Activity: Skeletal System

This document provides instructions for a lab activity where students analyze a chicken bone to learn about the skeletal system. Students will remove meat from a chicken wing to observe ligaments and cartilage. They will see that chicken bones resemble human arm bones. Examining the interior of bones reveals red bone marrow. The experiment then tests how vinegar versus water affects bones by soaking separated wing bones for days, with the expectation that vinegar will dissolve calcium salts and weaken the bone.

Uploaded by

ac mangulad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lab Activity: Skeletal System

Analyzing a Chicken Bone

To better understand what bones are made of, we want you to experiment on a chicken
bone. If we are studying the human body, why are we going to do an experiment with
a chicken bone? Well, chicken bones are similar to our own. They are not exactly like
human bones, but they are similar enough that we can learn a few things about our
own bones by studying those of a chicken. Also, chicken bones are a lot easier to find
and experiment on!

You will need:


 A cooked chicken wing
 A pair of rubber or plastic gloves
 White vinegar
 Two plastic containers with lids (just big enough for a chicken wing and some
liquid)
 Plastic wrap
 Knife

Procedures:
1. Put on the gloves
2. Using your fingers, remove all the meat from the bone. If you can’t get it all off
with your fingers, ask your parent to use the knife to help you. As you are doing
this, see if you can see anything else besides meat. The meat is muscle, but the
bones are connected with ligaments, and there is cartilage at the end of the
bone. Can you see any cartilage or ligaments? Don’t worry if you can’t. That’s
not the main point of the experiment.
3. Look at the bones. Notice that there is one thick, long bone that connects to two
thinner long bones. Does that sound familiar? It should – that’s what the bones
in your arm are like.
4. Cut or break the largest bone (remember, it’s called the humerus) in half and
look on the inside of the bone. Do you see something red there? What is that red
stuff? It is the chicken’s red bone marrow. That’s where the chicken’s blood cells
come from.
5. Do you remember what material makes the bone strong? It’s calcium. We are
going to do an experiment that actually removes calcium from the bone to see
what happens to it. Fill one of the containers about half full of vinegar.
6. Fill the other container about half full of water.
7. Pull the two thinner bones of the wing away from each other.
8. Put one of the two bones in the container that has water.
9. Put the other bone in the container that has vinegar.
10.Put plastic wrap over each container.
11.Put the containers aside for a few days.
12.Vinegar is an acid that will remove the calcium salts from the bone. Using a
Scientific Speculation Sheet, make a hypothesis about any differences you think
you will find between the two bones.
13.After three days, check your chicken bones. What happened? Record your results
on your Scientific Speculation Sheet.

Observation:
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Documentation:

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