For a while now I have been teaching my eldest and (some what my youngest) about the Human Body with this great DVD called Human Biology by PeterWeatherall. Which goes through many of the body's system and has a great catchy song that accompanies each body system, but to help my youngest really fathom the Human Body I wanted to give her some more 'hands on' experience to really understand how we work.
Don't worry I didn't take her to the local morgue or anything like that. I did however, find a great book with some age appropriate experiments to do and it was a bargain price of $5 woo hoo and really who can pass up a bargain???
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| Mini scientist My Body by Lisa Burke |
So here is the first one I did with her, BODY DETECTIVES
What you will need.
1. A big sheet of Butcher paper
2. Colour construction paper (lots of different colours depending on how many organs you want to do0
3. A black texta for drawing the organs and labelling them
4. Scissors
5. Double sided sticky tape or glue or blue tak (depending on if you want to take the organs on and off to do the project over and over again)
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| Draw around your child's body and stick up on wall |
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| Draw and cut out major organs. Clearly mine are not to scale. My heart is way too big and so is the brain but in this the object is to 'understand' where the organs are in the human body. I chose 6. Miss S corrected me that the intestines were 'Actually the large intestine Mum' This has been corrected. |
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| 'The Body' ended up falling down so we did the activity on the floor Here she is ready to stick on the lungs |
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| Lungs are on |
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| Heart on. Yes she did need a little help knowing exactly where to stick the heart. She knew roughly but she kept putting the heart more to the right. I got her to put her hand on her chest to feel her heart be beating. I said your hand is slightly to your left so your heart in the picture needs to be slightly to the left. |
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| Stomach on. |
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| Brain now going on no help needed with this one. Even Miss A watched and tried to 'help' much to the disgust of her older sister |
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| Liver on. As you can see it is slightly over sized but I had to help with this one and explain where it went. She had a slight idea but we have not really talked much about the Liver and its many functions yet. |
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| Large Intestine going on she knew all about this one she even lines it up so 'poster S' could poop. |
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| Finished Product and a happy girl. Although I am aware it is not Anatomically correct. |
We then watched some of the Human Biology DVD again. It is divided up into segments so we watched the digestive system, Respiratory System, Nervous System and Circulatory system to back up what we have learnt.
If I was to do this again I would add the Oesophagus, Pancreas and the Gall Bladder just to make it more interesting and last a bit longer as an activity.
I hope you enjoyed this blog and find this a great activity to do for the cold winter days ahead or if you are in the Northern Hemisphere an activity to do when you are inside because it is too hot.
Happy Teaching
Kimba,
I love what you have done. It's a much better use of butchers paper than the standard body outline all kids do in kindy. I will try this out with my kids, we also have the Peter Wetheralls DVD, they love the songs. I think my kids would like a skeleton one too! I may use a chalk outline so we can do the activity a few times.
ReplyDeleteThanks mandabplus 3. I was thinking about a skeleton one two but maybe with sticks from our back yard or gluing on some fettutine to represent the bones.
ReplyDeleteFantastic Job Kimba, love the idea!
ReplyDeleteHaven't done the organs yet so we will give it a try...we actually did bones as little A managed to pull a heavy dish off counter onto her toe, requiring an X-ray! ( who knew that broken toes in toddlers is actually a huge deal, even requiring surgery sometimes!). Regardless, she was okay but had a great learning opportunity for bones...
I actually crew a 'skeleton' around her lunch stuff, pretzels, noodles, fruit, beans, etc...whatever shapes I needed...I then made up an absolutely RIDICULOUS song along the lines of "oh, gee, I think you ate your knee (that's. Patella!) , oh, Shhss, there goes your humorous, etc....she still giggles and names bones after one little lunch!
Maybe I will have to figure one out to Peter Weatherall's music!
Kerileanne99