The Digestive System ~Part Two!

 We've been doing even more projects involving the digestive tract; most of them have been Fynn's idea.

We've lately been watching The Magic School Bus : For Lunch where the class takes a trip through one of the kids' digestive system. So today, Fynn told me to come with him in his magic car that he built, and we got tiny and took a trip through Mama Whale's digestive system, which was through the whole house & backyard. (If you don't already know, Mama Whale is Fynn's favorite stuffed animal.)

 We estimated the sizes of each of our small & large intestines, and cut strings to those sizes. Fynn loved that because he loves measuring. Rowan used his string to practice cutting.

On his own, Fynn made a marker drawing of the digestive system from memory, and also of the large intestine.

I drew blank bodies for them on yellow paper for them to draw the digestive system. Fynn drew his in with marker right away, while Rowan let me help him glue on a string esophagus and balloon stomach. He colored his own small and large intestines.

Fynn's entire system

Fynn's large intestine

Fynn's

Rowan's with "small intestine" and "large intestine" :)

 The kids wanted to learn about pee too, so we found a pretty neat model of the urinary tract at highhillhomeschool.blogspot.com . We changed our model a little bit, but it was pretty much the same idea.

As you can see, we cut the tops off two bottles and taped those to some cardboard for the kidneys. We wanted filters in our kidneys, so we poked holes in the bottoms of two yogurt cups and put those inside the "kidneys". We used two straws for the ureters and attached those to the bottles by taping the necks of small balloons .  The bladder was one of the leftover bottle bottoms. We attached the urethra (a cut piece of straw) by cutting a hole in the bottle and using a small piece of balloon for a gasket. (The bottom of the bottle was too thick to poke a hole, so I had to poke it sort of on the side which is why the urethra is sticking out in that ridiculous way.) High Hill Homeschool used lentils to represent the blood that was filtered out through the kidneys, so we used quinoa, which is what we had, mixed with water and yellow food coloring. Our filters didn't work so well, however, so we took them out and just poured the liquid into the kidneys, and watched it shoot out into the bucket (toilet). A perfect project for two silly boys!

 Well, I guess that's all for now.
 Happy learning!
 ~Beth

The Digestive System ~Part One!

 So it's all about poo these days; poo at breakfast, poo on the swing, poo, poo, poo all day long. I can't seem to get away from it! So  that's how we stumbled into our accidental "unit" on The Digestive System.

The first thing we did was to Make Poo: a simulation of food being digested and turning into poo. We found a bunch of instructions on the internet to do this, and it was very gross so I didn't get very many pictures. We just put some cereal, waffle pieces, milk, orange juice and coffee into a bowl with some water, to represent saliva. We used a spoon to mash it all up, representing chewing. We added some lemon juice, which represents stomach acid, then mixed it all up some more. We then funneled it into a sock, to act as the large intestine, and squeezed out the extra moisture. Then we put it in a plastic bag with a hole in it to squeeze it out like poo!

 Yuck!

 We also drew and colored a Digestive System poster together...

  ...And put together a Marble Slide Model of the Digestive system by duct taping parts to a piece of cardboard.

The purple tunnel was the esophagus, a honey container was the stomach, pieces of real marble slides were the small and large intestines, and the bucket was the potty.

  Fynn built us a digestive system out of a real marble slide...

First Digestive System Model

Second model with wheel at the top for teeth!

 ...And he also built us a huge Digestive System ride out of the slide and some collapsible tunnels. It was really fun!

Fynn is about to go down the esophagus while Rowan is hung up in the stomach.

Rowan is about to enter the large intestine.

  ...We traced each other's bodies so we could draw our digestive systems inside...

...And we read these really cool books on Digestion and The Body in general:

~Beth