Our bone sculpture Super failure

Every year the health museum hosts a contest.  The contest is to make a five foot tall bone sculpture that goes along with the year's theme.  Crystal and I thought this would be a great opportunity for the older Green and Hargrave kids to get together on a team project and make something... and learn about bone anatomy in the process.  So we all put our heads together and came up with an idea.  The theme was "Super Skeleton" so we chose to make a Texans football player having won the Superbowl.  Except we never got that far.

Jakob and Halle buried Gracie

The site recommended paper mache as a method of making our skeleton.  So that is what we did.  The kids had a blast tearing up lots and lots of newspaper into strips.  We made a nice paper mache paste out of flour, salt, glue, and water.  Everything was hunky-dory at first.

We used a balloon as the mold for the skull and different sized rods/pipes for the bones.  We were going to adorn our skeleton with a Texans Jersey and stick a Superbowl ring on the finger.  We spent a whole day paper mache-ing our bony player.  It was sort of looking like it was coming together, but it still wasn't very good.  Nonetheless, the Greens left our house and planned to return a few days later once the glue had dried to continue the project.

Then I happened.
And Arden happened.
And Rudi happened.
And finally the rain happened.

1.  I tried to cut out the eye sockets for the skull and did a terrible job.
2.  Arden thought I did a GREAT job, got a hold of the skull and decided to try it on like a mask.  It ripped in two.
3. We'd left some of the bones outside to dry in the sun.  Turns out that dogs like not only real but paper mache bones as well.  Rudi shredded a few.
4.  By this time we'd given up (it was a few days later)  The remaining bones were left on the patio and the moisture from a rainstorm ruined the last few.

We tried.  There's always next year.... And if anything we all learned a thing or two about paper mache, and the kids learned the names of several bones.


Here's a few pictures of some of the people that DID turn in projects.