Dear Model Makers,

My favorite place in Denver is the diorama hall at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I could spend a whole day just looking at those amazing dioramas and marveling at how the Galapagos Islands, the Smokey Mountains, and Kalahari Desert have all been magically transported and recreated in one building in the middle of Denver, Colorado.

Those places come alive in the dioramas because of the care the curators took when they created the models. Indeed, those models can sometimes teach us more about the real thing than the thing itself. That’s because when we make a model we have to think about the parts, how they interact, and how they create the whole.

Today, we’ll make models of body systems. You’d think that we’d be experts about body systems because we’ve been living with them our whole lives, but through model making, we’ll learn so much more.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck