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 water. The heart muscle squeezes blood out of its way. Between beats it goes back to its original shape.  The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet. The kids had a tough time actually squeezing the tennis ball, but they got the idea.

Our bodies have 5.6 liters of blood.  We measured that out in a big pot:

Circulatory System Activity:
This is how Harold looked before we started. I named him to pique the kids’ interest!

After we drew the lines — arteries and veins — together, I got two tiles.  I put the blue tile on top and the red tile on the bottom.  I traveled from the heart as a blue tile (with red underneath) to the lungs where I flipped over and became the red sided tile.  Then I ‘drove’ my red tile back through the heart and out into the body.  I decided to go to the brain to drop of oxygen where I flipped my red tile back to blue.  The blue tile traveled along the blue veins back to the heart and then to the lungs.

After we all took a number of turns doing that, we piled blue/red or red/blue tiles all over Harold’s body to show the path of blood.

I searched everywhere for a heart-circulatory activity and never found one… but this activity that somehow jumped into my head turned out to be a HUGE hit in our house!! The kids even spent a long time “teaching” Dad what they had learned!

Heart and Circulatory Activity

Blood Activity:

Another day we learned a bit more about blood. We cut open a chicken leg bone (before baking it for lunch) and examined the bone marrow. We had read in one of our books that bone marrow is where blood cells are formed. We took a close look at the bone marrow, poked and prodded.

Then we “made” our own blood.  The types of cells made in bone marrow include red cells, white cells and platelets.    We talked again about the basic function of these cells.

• the fluid is called plasma (corn syrup)
• red cells carry the oxygen (red jelly beans)
• white cells fight infection (white jelly beans)
• platelets help to clot and form scabs (rice)

The Wrinkled Heart Activity: And now on a related, but different note… today I decided to address the heart in the emotional sense too. I found this wonderful idea at ProTeacher. It is an activity about the things people say that can be hurtful and the things people say that can be kind.  Before I read Chrysanthemum to the kids (since that’s the book I had on hand), I cut out a heart.  Then after we read the book we talked about the things the mice said that were hurtful (and I made folds in the heart) and things we’ve said to each other that have been hurtful (more folds) and things that they’ve heard others say that might be hurtful (more folds). Then we talked about things we say that are kind (unfold). We said as many kind things as we could until the heart was unfolded. Then we talked about how the heart was still wrinkled and how the hurtful things we hear can linger for a while in our heart. We hung our wrinkled heart in the homeschool room as a reminder to be kind to one another. What a lovely idea, don’t you think?