Science unit: Studying the human body

We have had a whole lot of fun studying the human body over the past month! When I started preparing for this unit I was thinking we would study it over the course of two weeks, but the boys were so fascinated, I added a lot more onto it. I was pleasantly surprised at how much Damian understood and how much he enjoyed it. He even explained to me how the white blood cells where fighting off his cold virus while he was sick a couple weeks ago…I am pretty sure I didn’t know anything about white blood cells when I had just turned 3 years old! ;)

Here is a round up of what we covered during our study of the human body:

• We read a lot of books, and used them as a starting point for many of the aspects of our further research/activities. All the books are shown at the end of this post. The books vary in their level of difficulty, since I am teaching at preschool and grade 1 level at the same time.
  
• For a fun start to the unit, and to get our bodies moving we sang and acted out “head, shoulders, knees, and toes”, getting faster and faster with each round (and more and more silly too!).
  
• We read the Magic School Bus: Human Body, watched the Magic School Bus: Human Body DVD (Damian did not last long with the DVD, he thought it was a little gross, so Rylan watched the rest while he was napping), and did all the experiments included in the Magic School Bus: Journey inside the human body science kit.

{creating a ball and socket joint, with vegetable oil (synovial fluid) to make the movement of the “joint” more fluid}

{getting a feel for how muscles work}

{experiment aimed at comparing our different lung capacities}

{using iodine to test whether foods contain starch. We also did an exercise to identify the different areas of taste on our tongues, but I thought I would spare you photos of that one!}

{building our own stethoscope to listen to our hearts; we also compared restful and active heart rates}

{learning about the functioning of the diaphragm}

• We completed the life sized poster included in the above science kit.
  
• We did a few more experiments related to the human body from this book:
  
• We put together a large skeleton puzzle, which can be downloaded here. And then sang “Dem Bones” (which the boys learnt from a scholastic DVD a couple of years back) just for fun.

• We put together a glow in the dark skeleton that I picked up for $3 at our local science museum shop.

• Both of the plastic and paper skeletons, along with all the books and other activities (that could be repeated by the boys on their own), that we did during the course of our study were placed in our “feature study” area of our school room, so the boys could come back at different times to read or work with the materials individually.

• We drew diagrams of the eye after we read about the eye and how it works.
  

{Damian at work}

• We made red and white blood cells out of construction paper after reading about the circulatory system.
  
• Rylan read through and completed this book:

• Rylan completed several worksheets on the human body during his workbox time in the mornings, here are some examples:
• My wonderful body
• Body Parts
• Human heart
• Human skeleton
• Major organs of the human body
• Human body word search puzzle
  
• We went to our local science museum to visit their human body section and worked through all the different hands-on displays. This was a lot of fun (although a couple of the items really grossed the boys out! :) ).
  
• After reading our last book Happy and Healthy the boys did the exercises in Yoga For Kids Vol. 2: ABC’s.

We will definitely be re-visiting a study of the human body in the future, when the boys are older and we can study the topic more in-depth.

This has been added to Preschool Corner & 5K too and Show & Tell.