Human Body - Day 4

Today - Heart and Blood

I have to apologize for the pictures.  I HAD to print today's things in red, but that makes it hard to see in the pictures.

We read about the heart from Blood and Guts.  We listened to daddy's heart to hear the sounds it makes.  We learned the difference between the right side and left side.

We saw how the blood circulates out of the heart into the body and then returns to the heart.  The red veins is blood returning to the heart and the blue veins is the blood coming from the heart.

Then, for one of our experiments, we did a stress test.  We measured our heart beat laying down, sitting up, standing, after 25 hops, after 100 hops and after running around the house.

And we talked more about the blood.  I found this worksheet online.  It gave good information about the ratio of white and red blood cells, platelets and plasma.

And we made candy models of the blood.  We didn't have the right ingredients (because I forgot to get them at the store.)  So we made up our own.

We used 5 cut up gumdrops for red blood cells, 5 white chocolate chips for white blood cells, a tsp. of red sprinkles for platelets and 2 Tbsp. of corn syrup for plasma. 

Human Body - Day 3

Muscles

After reading about our muscles in the Blood and Guts book, we did facial calisthenics to work our muscles.  We discovered that when we move, there are 2 muscles at work - one is contracting and the other is relaxing.  Then we chose to make a model arm.  Ours didn't work like it should've because we used round balloons rather than long balloons.  It was a cool experiment anyway.

We learned some of the names of the muscles, like pectorals, deltoids, biceps, triceps, and quadriceps.  There are over 600 muscles in our bodies.

There are 3 types of muscles - skeletal (the ones attached to our bones that make us move), smooth (like our lungs and stomach - involuntary muscles), and cardiac (our heart). 

We also learned where the smallest (inner ear), largest (butt), most active (eyes) and strongest (jaw) muscles are in our bodies.

Tomorrow begins the circulatory system and the heart.

Human Body - Day 2

Today we talked about our bones and skeleton.  We started out building a large skeleton model from Easy Make and Learn.

After reading about our bones in Blood and Guts, we looked at a picture labeling a skeleton from Evan Moor.

We felt our ribs, scapula, and patella.  We briefly talked about the different joints and noticed how our hips can rotate but our knees only bend one direction.  We learned that babies have many more bones than adults and learned how a bone grows by adding calcium deposits to each end until they are fully grown.  Also, the collar bone is the last bone to stop growing.

Human Body - Day 1

The reading of Madeline jump started a 3 week study of the human body in our house.  We are using the following resources:

Blood and Guts
Usborne's Understanding Your Muscles and Bones
Usborne's Understanding Your Brain
Usborne's Understanding Your Senses
Easy Make and Learn Projects - Human Body (scholastic)
Evan Moor's Giant Science Resource Book

Also information from the internet, mostly linked from www.squidoo.com/humanbodylapbook

Our first day, we talked about cells.  Out of the Make and Learn projects, there was a cell mobile.  Instead of a mobile, we attached each cell to it's description with short piece of string and glued them into the lapbook.

We also did a worksheet from the same book called Magnified Mysteries.  These are little magnifying glass showing close up parts of the body - eye, inner ear, muscles, lung, etc.

And to finish our introduction, we created a Body Book (from Make and Learn). 

Then we began talking about our skin and hair.  We read from the Blood and Guts book.  There is much information in that book.  We are only touching on each subject.  There are also many experiments in that book.  We are only choosing a few.  When they are older, maybe they would like to go through the book again and go into more detail.  I have also created some of my own books that will be posted on homeschoolshare.

We chose a cool experiment that shows that not every place on our hand feels the same sensations.  We used a grid drawn on our hand and a larger grid from graph paper, a straight pin, a paper clip, hot water, ice cube and a toothpick.

It's very hard to see our graph on paper.  In each box on our hand, we tested to see if we could feel pressure, pain, cold and hot.  On the graph, we used a different symbol to record which sensations we felt.  It was interesting.

 

Madeline

We read Madeline for co-op this week and had some fun with France building the Eiffel Tower with cookies.

We took it home to show Daddy (yes, it made it home without collapsing), and we ate it for dessert!

We also had a local volunteer EMT come to talk to us and show us inside an ambulance.

 

Geography Fair

Each child or family in our co-op chose a country that they wanted to study and do a presentation on.  Alex chose Ireland and Nicolas chose Brazil.  We spent about 3 weeks doing research, printing pictures and maps, and putting them all on a display board, lapbook and doing small projects to display on their tables.  Other countries that were done were Haiti, Iraq, Ukraine, Holland, Burkina Faso and Canada.  We had fun doing it and had a good turnout of people that came to see our research.  Here are some pictures of the boys' presentations.

Nicolas had a rainforest book, The Great Kapok Tree, and The Umbrella on his table.  He also had music from Brazil playing.

On his map he drew lines from the city to a description about that city.  From Rio de Janiero, he drew a line to the Christ Redeemer statue and a description about it and a line to the largest soccer stadium in the world.  We printed a picture of the Soccer World Cup and wrote the years that Brazil has won - more times than any other country in the world.  We also have a model of the rainforest and a description of each layer of the rainforest.  There is a paper on there telling some of the things we get from Brazil and listing the countries by size, which Brazil is listed 5th largest in the world.

About the Piranha that lives in the Amazon River.

A Brazilian tambourine made with fishing line, a stick and bottle caps.

And we made Brigadeiro, the national candy of Brazil.  We had spoons at the table for people to try samples.

At Alex's table we had a scrapbook of Ireland from a family member that has been there, a book about St. Patrick and the book S is for Shamrock - An Irish Alphabet.  He also had music from Ireland (jigs) and a video of Ireland playing on the laptop.

On his board, he had a timeline of the history of Ireland, a listing of the major sports of Ireland, a picture of road bowling (popular in Ireland - you roll a metal ball for a specific number of miles down the road.  Whoever has the least number of rolls wins), and a picture of an Irish hound - the largest dog in the world.  We had a small paper listing some facts about the country - population, President's name, etc.  We also showed on the map and in the timeline why there is an Ireland and a Northern Ireland.

This is an Irish linen and a bracelet made of marble that came from Ireland that family members had from when they visited.

Pictures and an explanation of the Blarney Stone.

Alex made Irish butter tarts.  It's basically flour, butter and brown sugar for the crust and oatmeal, brown sugar and eggs for the topping.  We cut them into samples for people to try.

If you would like to see more pictures of the other country displays, my friend, Ami, has posted many more on her blog.  http://www.walkingbytheway.com/blog/?p=491

If you would like to see how to set up your own geography fair, or want to know what we had to do to prepare for this one, Ami has explained all that on her blog.  http://www.walkingbytheway.com/blog/?p=498

Can't wait for next year!!!

Ducks

After reading The Story About Ping (set in China), we completed a duck lapbook using the book Ducks, by Gail Gibbons.  (These pictures are all from Nicolas's lapbook.)

We looked at how many different kinds of ducks there are (150), what ducklings can accomplish as they get older, what preening is, the most common type of duck (Mallard), what enemies ducks have, what the male, female and baby ducks are called (drake, hen and duckling), the difference between male and female duck calls, migration and homing.

Also, the characteristics of a waterfowl, about the nests and eggs, what ducks are domesticated, and the difference between dabbling and diving ducks.

Finally, definitions like instinct, brood, and clutch, habitats of ducks, and that people in China raised ducks for feathers, meat and eggs.