Learning about Digestion with friends…

I have been so busy with some family things going on that I am finally getting a chance to get caught up on my blog posts… Here’s a post from last month’s Anatomy group.

In our Anatomy group we did some fun stuff with digestion.

We started out with some experiments.

First we did an experiment using spit and checking for amylase.

Then we looked at some different foods and checked for fat using brown paper and a light source. Some of the ones we tested were bread, macaroni, bacon, and cheese.

Then we took different colored yarn, cut in the actual lengths of parts of the digestive system, starting with the esophagus and working down to the rectum. The kids were divided up into teams of boys and girls and had to compete to see who could place the correct color string in the correct place the quickest.

  

Then we stretched all the yarn out to see how many kids it would take to go the entire length of the digestive tract. It took all six kids lined up (head to toe) down the hallway and there was still a little string left.

        

Then we were off to the classroom for some crafting… we created the GI tract our of playdough… FUN STUFF!!!

                  

Then we played a game where the kids had to sit back to back and be the intestine and “squeeze” their “food” down the tract…

 

And we finished off with a fun game where each child has a job to do in the GI tract and the others had to guess what they were doing and what part they were…finishing off with eating some M&Ms…

We are loving this study!!

The Digestive Track ~ Week 1

  We are loving using Jeanne Fulbright’s Exploring Creations with Human Anatomy and Physiology

This was our first week learning about digestion and what happens to the food we put in our bodies…
   Working on labeling the alimentary tract…
   Libby’s journal
   Tommy’s journal


We spent quite a bit of time talking about out teeth and how to care for them.
        A cool board game that we played about taking care of your teeth.


The next step was discussing saliva and we did a neat cracker and cheese experiment that was in our books and learned how amylase breaks down carbohydrates. The kids had fun using a mirror and finding their glands and touching their hard and soft palates.
Then we were on to the tongue, where we discussed briefly the job of taste buds and where they were found ~ we’ll be going more in depth with those later.
We also spent some time talking about teeth in other animals and the similarities or differences in their diets compared to ours and their need for different teeth.

We have used a few different books as go-alongs like:
“George Washington’s Teeth”  
and here’s a great pic of what one set of his false teeth actually looked like ~ I can’t imagine how uncomfortable they must have been with the spring loaded action. OUCH!! 













“Teeth and Tusks”  (from the “Look At” series)  

and “Take Care of Your Teeth”   

And made a neat digestion poster using printables from this book.       
Some links that I used this week were:
SurfNet Kids
Kids Health
Inner Body
Enchanted Learning  where I found some great printables to use this week.

And as a finisher to our beginning of digestion we watched a couple of videos
An episode of “Sid the Science Kid” ~ Feeling Good Inside and Out

and these great videos on YouTube:

and this one

Check back in to see where else digestion takes us as we explore where our food goes…
Happy Learning!!

The Muscular System

We’ve slowly been working through the muscular system in “Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy”…
Here are some things we’ve done..
  seeing how long it takes for the muscle groups in our arms to wear out… They made it about 4mins and 30 seconds..
   learning about the different muscle groups that are at work when we do jumping jacks… and if the muscle in the shin plays a part in the effort…
   learning about the different muscle fibers, cells, and energy production…
   building an arm…
   we needed long balloons for the muscles but I only had the round kind in our craft bin… So no muscles on this arm…
and finally a working arm with triceps and biceps…
         

The Muscular System ~ Week 1

We started out our week by finishing a project that I hadn't gotten around too last week...



Yes my son is trying to be a wizard in this photo... He wore the bandana all week ~ coming to school as a stage coach bandit, a wizard, and a motorcycle man... (another great thing about homeschooling, creativity never wans)

Then we started our reading on the muscular system...
We learned the body has 604 muscles and that they make up approximately 40% of your body weight.

The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in the body.

The Masseter is the most powerful muscle and the eye has the most movement... we discussed REM sleep, how muscles pull instead of push and that if all your muscles were to work together at once they could pull over a semi-truck...

Learning how our muscles work up and down like an inch worm moves...

I love using this Apologia series... I'm reminded everday when we open up the book ~ that the human body is such an amazing thing and what an awesome creator we have.

Dem Bones, Dem Bones... Learning about our framework with friends...

Yesterday we had our biweekly A&P project group with our HS friends...

We started out by going over some info from Blood and Guts.

This is a great book for any human body study.. the lessons and projects in it are easy to use and understand... We talked about the different bones ~ long, short, flat, etc.... and then discussed the different types of hinges found in the body...

After this discussion, we moved on to a game of Skeletal Simon Says by calling out different bones and the kids having to touch these places... That was a lot of laughs!!!!



Then we went to the craft table and began working with some clay ~ the object being that the kids would realize that without bones our bodies would just slump like a clay figure not being able to stand~ but with the addition of bones (toothpicks) we were able to stand upright and have mobility... We had lots of unusual people made today...

� before we added�bones

��� and after� TA - DAH!!!

Then we watched some brief video clips from BrainPop... Love these videos!!! BrainPop is a pay site bt you can see a preview of one of their skeletal videos here.

We watched a DK Eyewitness video on the "SKELETON" and then played one last game of "PROFESSOR NOGGIN's HUMAN BODY"...

Exploring Human Anatomy ~ weeks 3 & 4...

These last two weeks have been very busy, so I am a little late in getting my posts about A&P done...

We are still really enjoying it... These 2 weeks were spent on the skeleton ~an amazing frame with tons of incredible features.

Here are some of the book we used:


I still think the journals have been one of the best additions to our science studies and I would reccomend them to everyone... They have made it so much easier to keep up with notebooking, narration, activities, and copywork...
DS's Notes...

DS's labeled bone...

DD's copywork with her labeled bone...

DS's color-coded notes

One of the fun things we did, was to have some chicken wings for dinner ~ we then boiled the bones to remove the excess meat and used them for an experiment to see how pliable the bones could be using vinegar...

This experiment cam from the book Blood and Guts. I love this book ~ it has all kinds of fantastic experiments and information about the human body...

We taped out first finger to our middle finger and tried to do our schoolwork ~ they both complained how difficult it was to write ~ proof to them that God knew exactly what he was doing when he created fingers (or "phalangeeeees" as DD said)...

We used some minibook pages�I had gotten a while back and made a page to go along with the skeltal system workbook that discussed the hinges and hometcomb bone...

We looked at a chicken bone and talked about�the tendon/ligaments.�

We did a neat experiment with eggs�that showed how the skull protects our brain.
�we took the eggs and place them in a container ~ ran around the house and they broke but with a cushion of water, they stayed intact ~ no matter how rough the kids got with them....


We watched several videos�from BrainPop and a great DK Eyewitness video on�"Skeletons"

The kids played�"Operation"

and�made some art by using pasta and gluing it in the shape of the skeleton.


The also enjoyed playing our new�card game "Professor�Noggin's Human Body"....

See ya' next week!!

Learning about DNA with friends... (our 1st A&P group class)

A while back some friends and I talked about doing a class as a small group ~ we talked about history or something science related and came to settle on HUMAN ANATOMY... we chose to use the "Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and Physiology" book and journal series...

As individual families, we take 2 weeks to cover each lesson and then we are meeting biweekly to share a lesson and activity...

Today was our first group meeting and it went really well.

  

We started out the class with a discussion on cell division and used made a "model of a cell" activity from Janice Van Cleave's book "The Human Body for Every Kid"

  In this activity we used jello and grapes to create a simple cell with a snack-size bag representing the cell membrane, jello being the cytoplasm, and the grape being the nucleus.

                          

Then we made edible DNA using Twizzlers, toothpicks, and colored marshmallows. We discussed the different letters associated with nucleotides and what they each meant (T, C, G, A,)

  

working on the DNA strand

     

 the finished product..."A DOUBLE HELIX"

We read an article from  "The History News: Medicine" and talked about Vesalius and how he went about disproving some of Galen's theories  (that had been believed as truth for over 1400 years) by actually dissecting cadavers. Galen had only been able to dissect pigs, oxen, and monkeys ~ it was against Ancient Greek law to use cadavers...

 

We looked at cell permeability by taking a colander and pouring dreid beans and salt through it showing that a cell membrane will only allow like sized things to pass through it's pores ~ thus the "SEMIPERMEABLE MEMBRANE" theory...

My favorite part of our class was watching a great movie on the human body from Netflix called  "Eyewitness The Human Machine" .... You can see a clip of it here.

I think I enjoyed this class and learned as much as the kids did... I can honestly say that this is a science class that has my kids and me wanting to learn more... we love it!!