During a recent unit on the human body, one of my students
announced that his grandmother had fallen in her kitchen and
fractured her hip the previous week. Since we had just learned
that the pelvis is one of the strongest bones in the human body,
he wanted to know why her hip had broken from such a mild fall.
His question provided us with a wonderful opportunity to
investigate the skeletal system in greater depth, and we were
able to complete a number of activities that explored the topic
more fully. Unbeknownst to most people, bone is living tissue. A
close look at the inside of a bone shows something that looks
very similar to a honeycomb. To keep bones strong, the body is
always breaking down old bone and replacing it with new bone
tissue. As people grow older, more bone is broken down than is
replaced and the bone that forms the honeycomb gets smaller.
This can result in osteoporosis, a disease that weakens bones to
the point where they break easily. In a person with
osteoporosis, the spaces in the honey