The Digestive System
The digestive process begins in our mouths with the aid of our teeth, tongue, and saliva. Ask your scientist about the Ritz cracker experiement and the starlight mint experiement. We learned how long food remains in the stomach and how the small intestine is the workhorse of the digestive tract. Students were shocked to see that the small intestine is 21 feet long while the large intestine is 9 feet long. Mrs. Purlsley added to our study during Wellness class by continuing to talk about the many excretions made in our bodies to aid with the digestive process.
The Circulatory System
The heart, blood vessels, and blood make up our circulatory system. We learned (and laughed) at Bill Nye's video about the circulatory system. Ask your student why we squeezed a tennis ball 70 times in a minute? We are learning about how the heart pumps the blood, what is carried in the blood, and how the blood vessels are a massive transportation system. To better understand the complexities of the heart, we will be thinking about it as "the heart house." Please see the Children's Heart Institute website for more information about this.
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| http://childrensheartinstitute.org/educate/heartwrk/hearthse.htm |
