Tutor’s Corner: Anatomy!

We’ve divided the science curricula into trimesters for the year to address three areas of science: life, earth, and physical.  The students are starting the year learning about anatomy and the human body through hands-on, exploratory work. They’ve made models, played games, created life-sized, personal body replicas using various materials, plus SO much more!  

Thanks for following along with our “Tutor’s Corner” series!  This week, Jennifer dives a little deeper into the “SO much more” area of anatomy!

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As we continue to explore human anatomy during our science time at Global Foundations, we’ve learned about our brain and the five senses, the respiratory, digestive and circulatory systems. Up next we’ll be investigating muscles and bones and then putting it all together to create a life-sized outline of each student’s body!

We’ve been doing a lot of “testing”!

• Taste tests of our lunches
• Essential oil smell tests
• Hearing tests (What is that rolling around in the shoe box? What could that be rattling in the shoe box? What makes a big sound or a soft sound?)
• Touch vocabulary scavenger hunt (finding items that feel hard, soft, bumpy, crinkly, squishy, etc.)
• Blind box (with eyes closed, feel to see if you can identify what’s in the shoe box)
• A five-senses walk in the woods, recording what we hear, see, smell, touch and *shouldn’t* taste!

To explore the respiratory system we talked about breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, our lungs and diaphragm. We blew up balloons & stretched the “mouth” of the balloon to make sound vibrations like our vocal cords do as air passes through them.

For the digestive system, we experimented with noticing how food changes as we chew it for a long time. We cut up an apple to put in a food processor with some water to see the change. We talked about saliva and “gastric juices” and measured out the approximate length of our intestines in yarn!

After studying guts, we moved onto blood! We learned about the heart muscle and how blood flows through veins and arteries. We found our pulses and realized the older a person is, the slower his/her resting heart rate…and Wow do those heart rates change after 30 seconds of jumping jacks!

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It truly warms my heart to see and hear about all the engagement with the students on a day-to-day basis!  If you’re interested in learning more about our program or coming to take a day to try it out for yourself, please let me know!  We can’t wait to meet you!