Human Body & Anatomy 

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Age: Kindergarten - 4th Grade

When: Tuesday 8:00-9:00am

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Project-based learning every week! 

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Children have a natural curiosity about how the human body works.

 

“Human Body” is a course designed to ride that wave of curiosity and equip children with an understanding of the main body systems and organs that allow our bodies to function the way God created them. This introductory science class for young learners highlights God's design in His most fascinating creation... mankind. I have put together my own curriculum based upon pulling the best project ideas from "The good and the beautiful" Anatomy curriculum and "Apologia", Anatomy curriculum. 

We will explore through hands-on projects and analogies bringing these complex concepts to life for young learners!

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Some examples of what we do in class:

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The Cell:

We talk about the human body and how we have become much more knowledgeable over time. Think about it, with every discovery we become more and more blessed. The Greeks and Romans were fascinated with the world around them and discovered many things. And soon after a Dutchman discovered a microscope. Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek discovered a great use for glass lenses which opened up a whole new world for scientists. He found that if he made a lens correctly he could use it to magnify things, as much as 200 times its size. He made detailed drawings of what he found. One object was made up of tiny little rectangular blocks. They looked like the cells that monkeys sleep in so he called them cells.

We then made our own microscopic lens and experimented with how things look bigger. It's called magnification. We then built a cell diagram with jello and different materials to learn about what is in a cell and how it works. 

 

Bones: Skeletal System

Our bones are alive! We read from “ Wow in the world” book. Then we Made a human with a lump of clay. It doesn’t stand well. The students were then given toothpicks representing bones and inserted them in the body they just made. It was a lot more stable!  We have bones to protect our organs such as the brain, heart and lungs, it supports and shapes our body and bones make our blood and contain most of our body’s calcium. We will draw a life size skeleton while singing the bones song and paint in each bone as we learn about them.

 

Inside a bone: 

We made a model of a bone. Compact bone being small bubble wrap. Spongy Bones are like little tunnels that allow bones to bounce back. The honeycomb shape is very stable. We got a lot of little coffee straws and laid them on top of the compact bone. Then on the inside, we used red Play-Doh, rolled it into a snake and put it in the middle which represents the bone marrow where blood is made. Then a yellow tissue paper for the yellow bone marrow.

Then we rolled it all up to make our bone and taped it.

 

Breaking Bones:

Bones grow because of the growth plates on the end of bones. Cartilage which is in your ears, and nose is in between the growth plates osteoblasts come in to make more cartilage. We learned about bone health. What makes bones strong? Calcium, milk, vitamin D, the sun and exercise. The more you move your bones stronger they get. We then pretended that we were doctors and we had to diagnose a fracture. What is a fracture? There are lots of types and we went made each one on our worksheet. Then each student received a new pencil and were told to break them then reset it and we learned how to make a cast out of real cast material. 

We then divided into groups to learn how to make a sling. We learned how blood comes out of the bone to form a clot in the spot where the bone is broken and just like a scab the osteoblasts come over and make a scab entering that clot into cartilage. 

 

Life inside the blood: 

Hand on learning of what is inside our blood as we made our own blood out of food. 

First marshmallow. Marshmallows are like are white blood cells. Their job is to eat the germs. Platelets look like plates. They form a scab and stop the bleeding and then. Red Cheerios are the red blood cells cells. There’s so many of them that they turn your blood red. It’s like an inner tube because it carries oxygen and oxygen sits in the middle of the inner tube. When it drops off the blood or the oxygen, the red blood cell becomes darker that’s why some of our veins look blue.

 

Cardiovascular System - Veins and Arteries

Each student drew a life sized human with chalk and pretended that oxygen was a cup of water that was in our lungs we drew. Our dropper represented out blood and we picked up oxygen saying happily, “arteries, arteries, arteries”  and delivered the “oxygen/ water” to different parts of our HUGE chalk body. Then walking back in a heavy deep voice, we chanted, ‘veins, veins, veins”. We will then look at veins, arteries and blood under a microscope. 

 

Human heart

We learned that the heart is an organ, made up of very strong muscle, that pumps blood through the body. It is the main organ of the cardiovascular system; it carries substances to and from all parts of the body in the blood. Our  hearts are about the size of our fist and pear-shaped. You can find our heart high in the chest, slightly to our left. An adult’s heart weighs about  8-12 ounces and pumps blood by squeezing and relaxing in a regular rhythm. We call this rhythm a heartbeat. Your heart beats an average of 70 times per minute pumping more than 4 quarts of blood through your heart every minute. Take your pulse. The Human Heart Pump craft with a balloon, jar and straws to emulate a working heart.  Our hearts are divided into two parts  – right and left halves. Each half is divided into two hollow sections called chambers. We call each of these upper chambers  the atrium. The lower chambers are called ventricles. We use blood in heart models to represent the  right side of the heart as the blood comes from the body carrying waste product called carbon dioxide. Then the blood moves into the right ventricle and into the lungs. In the lungs, blood picks up oxygen and releases (gets rid of) carbon dioxide. The fresh, oxygen-rich blood enters the heart’s left atrium and on to the left ventricle which pumps the blood throughout the body to nourish and give energy to the rest of our bodies. We ended class with going over the chambers of the heart using graham crackers and covering them with different colors of frosting..  

 

Muscular System - 

We learned all the muscles in your body and did exercises to feel them. We learned why and how they grow and shrink by making a model with rubber bands and cardboard.  Each student then received their own skeleton and red play dough. After each exercise, we identified the muscle and put the play dough muscle on our skeleton where it went. 

 

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Contact: Lani Wilkinson, swishandclay@gmail.com