Science:Digestion

The Science word of the day: Digestion=breaking food down into smaller and smaller pieces

Our journey through the human body is well underway. The class has been very enthusiastic about this topic. And why wouldn't they. It includes two things that intrigue children at this age: themselves and mysterious, hidden worlds. 

The journey is starting with the digestive system. Reading The Magic School Bus: Inside the Human Body, is providing a basic foundation for this expedition. I read a couple pages from the story and then we explore the body system in more depth. 

So far the children have:

- made a paper puppet of teeth and talked about the importance of good dental hygiene. 

-hypothesized as to the size of their esophagus by drawing what they thought would be it's length and diameter. (This also introduced a new math word that came in handy when when we read a poem about pi this week.)  

-made a paper esophagus, using rulers to make it the actual size, and made a stomach that they attached to a plastic bag. This model was taken home and filled with water to represent the digestive juices in the stomach. Next, a cracker was added. The reports of the results, a "disgusting mush". 

-made the first additions of a mouth, esophagus and stomach, to the life size diagrams.