Xx is for x-ray!

A fun, hands-on way to explore the letter Xx with your students!

My students explored the letter Xx and the best word that I know of to examine the letter Xx is x-ray!

Begin with a Book

We had lots of fun with the word x-ray and today, I will share with you how the children made their own x-rays. We began by introducing x-rays with a book titled, “My Body” which is a Scholastic discover more book.  I hadn’t planned on reading the entire book because there is a lot of great information in the book. But my students were so interested in the book, that we took a picture walk through the book and stopped and talked about any page that captured the children’s attention which, by the way, was most of the book…

Making Connections to the Story

After looking through the book, I asked the children if they could use their x-ray vision to tell me what was inside my box….

Using the Story to make Predictions

The children informed me that they didn’t have x-ray vision so they didn’t know what was inside my box. Instead, they could guess what was inside my box and their first guess was that it was full of bones.  That was a really great guess, after all, we had looked at a book with bones and even copied one picture from the book to take a closer look at the bones…

So I gave the children a hint and told them that inside the box were things we could eat to help us have a healthy body and even healthy bones.  This hint led the children to make all kinds of great guesses and since we couldn’t see through the box with x-ray vision, we finally decided it was time to examine what was inside the box by actually opening it up…

Inside the box we found fruits and vegetables, a bottle of water and some milk…

Making their own X-rays

And now it was time to head off to make our own x-rays using our special x-ray ink  (a cup of water with black liquid water color added)…

The How To

To make our own x-rays, the children started by drawing around their hands. I did the first hand tracings and the children took it from there and did the second hand tracings or any other drawing they liked.  We traced our hands on a piece of folded paper towels…

Once we completed drawing around our hands, the children used glue to draw “bones” inside their hands…

The glue lines were best if they were thick but we let the children explore the process of adding glue lines any way they wished…

Once the children completed their lines of glue (or bones) they folded the second half of their paper towel on top of the glue lines and pressed down so that the two sheets of paper towels were firmly pressed against one another (the glue was now in between the two paper towels)…

And now the children were ready to add the x-ray ink. The children dripped the x-ray ink all over the outside of the paper towel until they could see all of their bones appear through the ink…

And once the entire surface was black, the bones did indeed begin to show through…

Examining the X-rays

The darker the ink, the better the bones showed up but after all the x-rays dried, everyone’s x-ray show up brilliantly!

Embracing the Process

The children caught on to the process easily and asked to make more x-rays. The children explored the process by drawing hearts and other things they found interesting…

The x-ray design and discovery process was fun to explore and we had some pretty amazing results…

After the children completed their x-rays, we let some of the excess x-ray ink drip or drain off just a bit…

Then we set them all out on sheets of drawing paper to dry overnight…

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Deborah J Stewart

Deborah J Stewart

Every time I think I know everything I need to know about teaching young children, God says, "Hold on a minute!" and gives me a new challenge.

Let me tell ya...

With each new challenge that you overcome, you will find yourself better equipped and more passionate about teaching young children.

God didn't call wimps to lead, teach, or care for His children. Nope, he has high expectations, so get ready. You will have to give your very best but after teaching for over 30 years, I can tell you that it is a wonderful and rewarding journey.

Whenever your calling feels hard, just remember, 'He who began a good work in you (and in the children you serve) will be faithful to complete it.'

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