Posted by : Karen Monday, August 29, 2011

Today in our shared school morning we took a closer look at the organs inside our bodies and what they do...


Lungs....

We explored the volume of air in our lungs and boy did they have fun! The principle is that if you breathe out through the tube, the air form your lungs displaces the water in the bottle. We've been playing with this every free moment! King Arthur and Miss K had vastly different volumes of air which was fascinating, and I'm on the search for a 5L bottle now to test Braveheart's lung capacity! (the one we used was 1.5L. Make sure your bucket is large enough to hold the displaced water!) 







Then we moved on to the digestive system. First they wiped off their tongues with paper towels before sampling a dry cracker. Without saliva on their tongues, they were unable to taste  it! Fascinating! 

Then they broke up some bananas and strawberries as their teeth would, put them in a jug, added some water for saliva, and blitzed! I love the wonder on Miss K's face!



They poured this ever so lowly into glasses, just like the stomach would release it into their small intestines! Delicious!

To examine peristalsis, they tried to push an apple through a sock  - the same way food is forced into their stomachs.... and then to further illustrate that food doesn't fall down into their stomach, they did some handstands and bends to show they could still successfully swallow a cracker....



Then (for some Language Arts) they listened to each other's stomach and tried to describe the sounds they could hear...



Then they measured out how long an adult's small intestine could be, and cut out a piece of string and tried to show how it would fit into my abdomen!


Then after a snack time and some stories, we played this Body Bingo game: 


It really is fantastic - it comes with three different difficulty levels, and for these two children I just named the organs straight out. (Warning, this took FOREVER to download, no idea why, so persevere!)


Here they are preparing their boards, choosing the organs they want to
place on their own Bingo Boards

Coloring in to come!
FUN!!!!

Have you done any fun experiments lately?

Lovely links that inspired me for this day:

4 Responses so far.

  1. WOW Karen, this is awesome. Looks like so much fun learning. They aren't going to forget this any time soon! Well Done

  2. Tammy says:

    Looks great thanks for the links.... We will do some of these.... Looks like lots of fun.

  3. This looks great Karen! I'm going to copy this, if you don't mind. Thanks for sharing. Been wondering how to make it fun.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Ah we having some fun with this to - Thanks for the great links. Shell

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