Oct. 23, 2009 - Human Body - Day 6

Today was also beautiful out, so we shortened our school day so we could enjoy the weather.  We even got a bike ride in today.

For our bodies, we finished up our lungs and talked about our vocal cords and larynx.  We felt the vibration difference when we made high sounds versus low sounds.

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Oct. 20, 2009 - Human Body - Day 5

Because of co-op yesterday, we did not continue the human body study.  Today, we talked about our lungs.  We made chest vests (from Easy Make and Learn) first.  As they show you each layer, they pretended to be dead - thus the funny faces.

Under their ribs are the lungs.

And behind the lungs, is the heart.

Then we put something similar into their books.  When you lift the rib cages, you can see the lungs.  The pull tab shows the lungs as they expand while breathing.

And we made a book about how big the lungs are (football sized.)

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Oct. 16, 2009 - Human Body - Day 4

Today - Heart and Blood

I have to apologize for the pictures.  I HAD to print today's things in red, but that makes it hard to see in the pictures.

We read about the heart from Blood and Guts.  We listened to daddy's heart to hear the sounds it makes.  We learned the difference between the right side and left side.

We saw how the blood circulates out of the heart into the body and then returns to the heart.  The red veins is blood returning to the heart and the blue veins is the blood coming from the heart.

Then, for one of our experiments, we did a stress test.  We measured our heart beat laying down, sitting up, standing, after 25 hops, after 100 hops and after running around the house.

And we talked more about the blood.  I found this worksheet online.  It gave good information about the ratio of white and red blood cells, platelets and plasma.

And we made candy models of the blood.  We didn't have the right ingredients (because I forgot to get them at the store.)  So we made up our own.

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Oct. 15, 2009 - Human Body - Day 3

Muscles

After reading about our muscles in the Blood and Guts book, we did facial calisthenics to work our muscles.  We discovered that when we move, there are 2 muscles at work - one is contracting and the other is relaxing.  Then we chose to make a model arm.  Ours didn't work like it should've because we used round balloons rather than long balloons.  It was a cool experiment anyway.

We learned some of the names of the muscles, like pectorals, deltoids, biceps, triceps, and quadriceps.  There are over 600 muscles in our bodies.

There are 3 types of muscles - skeletal (the ones attached to our bones that make us move), smooth (like our lungs and stomach - involuntary muscles), and cardiac (our heart). 

We also learned where the smallest (inner ear), largest (butt), most active (eyes) and strongest (jaw) muscles are in our bodies.

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Oct. 15, 2009 - Human Body - Day 2

Today we talked about our bones and skeleton.  We started out building a large skeleton model from Easy Make and Learn.

After reading about our bones in Blood and Guts, we looked at a picture labeling a skeleton from Evan Moor.

We felt our ribs, scapula, and patella.  We briefly talked about the different joints and noticed how our hips can rotate but our knees only bend one direction.  We learned that babies have many more bones than adults and learned how a bone grows by adding calcium deposits to each end until they are fully grown.  Also, the collar bone is the last bone to stop growing.

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