Category: Science: Human Body Unit

Where do Germs Grow? 24

Germ Experiment — Where Do Germs Grow in Your House??!

Germ Experiment: When I saw this germ experiment, I knew we had to add this into our unit on First Aid. After all keeping ourselves healthy is as important as patching up the injuries, right?! The experiment called for gelatin, sugar and petri dishes. We didn’t have petri dishes so used paper cups and covered them immediately with glad wrap in lieu of a cover. Boil 1/2 cup of water...

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First Aid Unit: Germ Lapbook

Our germ unit took about a week to complete in part because of the amazing germ-experiment we did (more about that next week… the experiment was awesome!).   We talked about the major types of germs: bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa.  While fungi can produce athlete’s foot and protozoa can cause giardia and malaria, we didn’t go into much detail about those. Some sources also consider helminths (worms) a germ as...

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Human Body Eggsperiment: Protect That Brain!

Our last brain-related activity was to design a helmet that would protect our egg pilot in a fall. The shell, I told them, was his skull; the egg white and yolk was his brain. Then I left the kids to it! LD designed a balloon-encased egg protector.      DD designed a construction paper protective cloak: Mom designed a cotton ball-play dough helmet: I took the photo before covering it...

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Human Body Unit: The Brain

We have been studying the brain in fits and spurts the last couple of weeks. For some reason, we’re only getting to it about twice a week. But here’s what we’ve done. We talked quite a bit about the functions of the brain (not the senses as we’ll do this later), but things like memory, thinking, sleep and thing like that. MEMORY: First we talked about the difference between long...

Heart Field Trip 3

Heart Field Trip

We don’t have a Magic School Bus, but we did make a pretty wonderful field trip this past (extended) weekend. One of our first stops was the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Part of the reason we studied the heart/circulatory system last week instead of going on to muscles and joints was to take advantage of the spectacular interactive science display at the Franklin Institute. You enter this huge heart on...

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Human Body Unit: Heart and Circulatory System Activities

Our study of the heart and circulatory system started with a listen to our own heartbeats. We measured our heart rates when resting and after walking, running and skipping. Then using a graph put out by Texas heart institute(4th grade curriculum, p. 25, no longer available), we graphed our results. Heart as a Pump: We did this experiment: When your heart beats it acts like a tennis ball filled with...

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Human Body Unit: The Hand

Our Study of the Human Hand Why do we have so many bones in our hand? We talked about the fact that there are 27 bones in the hand. First, to demonstrate why this is important I did an activity we had done a couple years ago. We pretended that we just had one bone per finger by taping popcycle sticks to their fingers.  Then they had to pick up...

Human Body Unit: Starting Off Again with the Skeleton 8

Human Body Unit: Starting Off Again with the Skeleton

Last spring we started learning a bit about the human body, but then we stopped as summer activities took over.  We have re-started our human body unit. Before I knew I was going to luck into a zillion human body kits (see my post about being lucky!), I bought the Squishy Human Body by Smart Lab.  The kids just loved this!  We talked about how the skeleton protects all of...