Body Language

We have been learning a little about the body this week.  It is hard for me not to go into too much detail and to adjust my expectations for a five year old's attention span, but it has been fun planning the activities and teaching Harper my favorite subject.

      

One of my friends from medical school, Danielle, sent the kids this anatomy book for Christmas.  It has been the perfect resource for our lessons.

    

   

   

We made a peeing man to explore how what we eat and drink turns into what we urinate.

     

   

My tubes had a few leaks, but Harper *mostly* understood that the kidneys function to clean the blood and that the waste (urea) and water then travel through the ureters to the bladder which then stores the urine until it is time to pee through the urethra.

   

  

It was fun watching our yellow water run through the body and out the urethra! 

    

Next, we did a quick lesson on the composition of blood.  This book, A Drop of Blood, was fantastic! 

  

We learned about red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma.  When I went downstairs later in the night, someone had eaten the red and white blood cells off my board.

   

   

Blood!

  

Harper received this felt body for Christmas.  It helps keep each lesson in perspective location-wise.  

  

After spending much of my call night at the hospital creating this set of lungs and heart model, I was able to show Harper how our lungs move in response to the diaphragm and how the heart is a pump.

    

When the diaphragm moves down, the negative pressure in the chest cavity helps the lungs to expand with air.  When the diaphragm moves up, the air in the lungs is expelled.

   

Our heart pump moved blood from the atrium on the left to the ventricle in the middle and then out to either the body or lungs.

     

  

We learned a little about muscles and the three types (smooth, skeletal and cardiac).  We made a hand to practice muscle movements.

  

    

   

  

I went a little high school anatomy class on Harper and ordered a sheep heart from an online educational store for part of our heart lesson.  It was actually really cool and she did a great job!  The only part she did not like was the formaldehyde smell.  We have a great anatomy resource from Aunt Chris and Uncle Paul that we saved and pull out to read every now and then.  It had great learning points on the heart.

   

Gowned and gloved!

   

The heart came with dissection tools so I could point out things like the aorta and pulmonary vessels.  She's not going to remember any of the specifics, but Harper knows the heart is a muscular pump that moves blood.

       

  

We could see the chordae tendinae, papillary muscles and valves!