Human Body Unit

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We have covered major body systems in our school before: the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, a genetics unit, and a few different units on babies. I thought it would be fun this time to talk about some of the amazing things people can do using all the different parts of their bodies. So, I called this unit "The Amazing Human Body." This was also a good lead-up to the birth of baby #9 in our family, as we ended with a review of babies and human reproduction!

It was kind of fun to have our section on "Bones" correspond with the week of Halloween—we made this cool life-sized skeleton out of milk cartons, and it made a perfect Halloween decoration for our porch! :)

Our milk-carton skeleton was a friend for this skeleton we already had!

More Bones activities: 

A life-size skeleton print-out (we printed several of these and the children colored them)
A video about the skeletal system

A diagram of major bones, for labeling
A little online skeletal system game

For muscles, 

we learned how muscles worked and made models of extensors and flexors.
We learned about some famous martial artists.
We watched some amazing gymnastic routines (here are some examples),
The kids LOVED seeing some of Damien Walters' work—he is a stuntman who does amazing tricks!
And we watched some Buster Keaton movies to learn about physical comedy in movies.

For the heart and lungs,

We made these lung models again,

We talked about deep-sea divers and this amazing man, Stig Severinsen

We learned about several Olympic athletes such as Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Eliud Kipchoge, and Rowan Hooper, an ultramarathon runner. 

We learned about anaerobic vs. aerobic respiration, oxygen exchange, and altitude sickness.

Here are some more activities about the heart and lungs.

For sight and hearing,

We learned about blind people who "see" using sonar or clicking sounds (see also here)

We watched a video about this archer with incredible eyesight (and reflexes!)

We learned about Stephen Wiltshire, a man with Savant Syndrome, who can remember and draw whole city skylines

And Derek Paravinci, who has an incredible ability for playing music by ear
We also watched some videos about samurais, marksmen, and archers, all of whom have developed their eyesight and reflexes in pursuit of excellence in their sports.

For memory, 

We learned more about short-term memory, long-term memory, mnemonics, and Savant Syndrome.
We watched a movie about Kim Peek, about whom the movie "Rain Man" was made. I haven't seen Rain Man, but we loved learning about Kim. We learned that he was a member of our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he loved the Book of Mormon!
We also learned about Daniel Tammet, who has a prodigious memory.

We also learned about Babies--

We did some activities we've enjoyed before (like swaddling, learning to change diapers, etc.), we read some of our favorite books, and the children even got to help do an ultrasound on me in preparation for the new baby!

Eyes and Vision Unit Study and Lesson Plan

This was a pretty short unit, and we have learned about some of these concepts before, in our Nervous System and Light and Optics Units. (And even way back in our Illusion Unit!) But it was a fun review, and we loved all the cool Optical Illusions books we got from the library!

The best part of our unit was visiting an optometrist's office. He is a homeschool dad, and he was wonderful at explaining to the children what he does and how all his cool equipment works. We loved it!

A couple other links of interest:

parts of the eye coloring page 

optical illusions

Blood Cells Under Microscope

After we did the blood typing activity we quickly smeared some of that nice blood onto a microscope slide so we could look at it! We have looked at blood cells before and they're very interesting, but it is harder than you think to get liquid blood! I've tried poking myself with a pin lots of times and I just can't get any blood (my survival instincts won't let me draw blood, I guess!). When I went to donate blood, I actually asked the nurse if I could have one of those little finger-pokers to use later, so I've got that one in reserve! But anyway, we already had some blood after blood-typing, so we leapt at the opportunity. :)

We're no experts in microscopy, so I'm not sure I can describe all the things we're seeing here, but you can definitely see those little flat/round cells! I am not sure if you can tell the red blood cells from the white? The white are bigger, we know. We thought we were picking out some differences but just weren't sure. And of course, my little iPhone photos don't really do justice to what we were seeing. It's hard to get in position a good picture without some sort of attachment for the phone!

We thought maybe that green triangle thing in the bottom left corner was a platelet?

And here is the blood as it was drying and starting to clot.

Cardiovascular System Unit Study and Lesson Plan

This unit had a lot of content but very few pictures, for some reason. I do have a few other posts I will put up, but I'll link most of the videos and other content we used here.

Also, we combined a short treatment of the immune system with this unit, since the blood cells play such a big role. We talked about viruses and bacteria, and immune response. We may study that more fully in the future.

First and foremost, I MUST mention this group of videos that the children LOVED. At first they just thought the videos were silly. They kept saying things like, "Hey, the blood cells can't fly in little ships!" "Hey, germs don't say 'heh heh heh'!"—and so forth. But then the children caught the spirit of the thing and began to love the videos with a deep and abiding love. It seems like maybe the episodes are from a British TV program called "Once Upon a Time Life"? I'm not totally sure. There are other episodes that show other parts of the body, but we just focused on the applicable ones to this unit. We got to know and love all the characters quite a bit. The action is kind of slow but it's all part of the charm! As is the music. And the explanations are actually quite good.

Here are the episodes we watched (I'm just linking Part I of each episode, but parts 2 and 3 for each one should come up on the "other videos" menu at the right side of your screen. Or maybe you can just search online for "once upon a time life" and you'll find whole episodes somewhere. Each episode is about 30 minutes long).

Once Upon a Time Life: The Tiny Platelets

Once Upon a Time Life: The Vaccination

Once Upon a Time Life: The Heart

Once Upon a Time Life: The Blood

Once Upon a Time Life: Breathing

Other than these gems, we also liked:

this video on how the heart pumps blood

this, on how a wound heals itself

and this (annoying, but understandable) video about blood types

Here are instructions on how to make a simple stethoscope. This totally didn't work for us, but maybe it will for you! Luckily we had this stethoscope of our own and the children enjoyed listening to each others' hearts with it.

Here you can hear the sounds of various heart murmurs. It's amazing that doctors can hear and distinguish these!

Another thing that didn't work for us: this heart pump model with the four soda bottles. Maybe our bottles were too small? Anyway, there's a whole good lesson plan with it, so this page is definitely worth a look.

Another heart pump model we didn't try.

You can make this model of a drop of blood.

Cell vs. virus

Did you know even bacteria (in this case, e. coli) can get a virus?

Cool video of a white blood cell chasing bacteria

This interactive site helps you visualize the size of a red blood cell (among other things)

Of course it's always nice to compare healthy lungs to smokers' lungs:

here

and here

Interesting article on artificial hearts

I've always thought it was fascinating how heart cells can beat all by themselves, and then sync when they get in proximity to one another. You can see a video here.

For a field trip during this unit, I called the Red Cross to see if the children could come watch me donate blood. We set it up during a less-busy time of day, and they were really great to work with me and allow the children to be close by. Our nurse was great—explaining stuff to them, letting them feel my bag of blood, etc. I'm not very squeamish about it and I like donating blood, so I didn't mind. Of course, most of all, the children liked getting pretzels and juice afterwards (the nurse kindly said they could have some, even though THEY weren't the ones who did the donating!). :) You can find a place to donate blood on the Red Cross website.

And here's my Cardiovascular System Unit Pinterest page.

Protein Synthesis Cookies Activity

This was probably our very favorite of this unit's activities. It was fun and it just seemed to really cement the idea of how proteins are formed into the children's memories.

An overview: In this activity, each pan with cookie dough in it is like a ribosome, where the synthesis of proteins takes place. The long chain of code on your paper is a strand of mRNA that codes for a specific protein. Each cookie topping is analogous to a different amino acid. Your hand (I guess?) is like the tRNA that goes and finds the right amino acid floating around in the cytoplasm and carries it back to be placed into the amino acid chain. And, when you are done placing all the toppings in the right order, the chain is analogous to a protein that can be released into your body to build tissue or carry out various other tasks.

And more background:

A video about protein synthesis

A video about types of RNA

Now. Here are the instructions. First, pre-activity preparation. You need to make a code-breaker sheet for each child. This will show which codons (or sequences of three bases) "code" for which amino acids (represented here by the various toppings—chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, marshmallows, etc.). Besides codons for amino acids, you need a start and a stop codon. Just so the children would know them, I used the actual codons for these that our bodies use--AUG for "start," and UAG (among others) for "stop." Then I just made up the other codons. Here was our "code":

• AUG—start
• AGA—chocolate chip
• GCC—peanut butter chip
• AGC—white chocolate chip
• UGU—sprinkle of cinnamon
• CUG—sprinkle of coconut
• AAA—chocolate kiss
• CCA—peanut
• GGU—sprinkle of rainbow sprinkles
• AUU—marshmallow
• UAG—stop

Next, write out the sequence of bases for each "protein." (Remember, proteins are chains of amino acids.) I made a different protein for each child (with a shorter one for Daisy to make it a bit easier for her). I included a sequence of "nonsense" at the beginning of each protein, representative of all the RNA that doesn't code for proteins in our chromosomes. I put in some nonsense at the end, after the "stop" codon, too.

I also made an answer key for myself, listing what the finished protein should look like for each child, so I could quickly check their work. (So for example, "3 chocolate chips, white chocolate chip, sprinkle of cinnamon, peanut, marshmallow, two peanut butter chips.")

And then, of course, you need to make your cookie pizza dough, and gather a bunch of different toppings. Here's the recipe for cookie pizza. We love it.

So, to do the activity, each child starts with a small pie pan and a handful of cookie dough. Press the dough into the pan about 1/2-inch thick. (Of course, you can press your dough in circles straight onto a cookie sheet, or even make a whole cookie pizza and let each child make his protein on a different section of the pizza. It's just easier for everyone to work at once when you use separate pans.)

Then, each child should look at his section of RNA code. Have him scan the sequence until he finds the start codon (AUG in our case). Circle the start codon. Then, with a pencil, make slashes or commas between each group of three bases after the start codon. (Don't divide the bases into groups of three before finding "start," or you might make your divisions in the wrong places and get totally different amino acids than you're supposed to! This does happen sometimes with DNA or RNA—it's called frameshift and can happen if a base is wrongly inserted to or deleted from the gene.) When you get to the stop codon, stop.

The next step is just transcribing each codon into its respective amino acid. So, with our example, if you saw "AGA," you would get a chocolate chip and place it onto your cookie. Line up the amino acids in the correct order, you can curl them around in a spiral or a wavy line if they won't fit in a straight line across your cookie (and this, too, is analogous to real proteins, as each protein has a specific shape which helps it do its job). When you get to a stop codon, you are done. 

Then bake your "protein" at 350 for 8 minutes or so (for small individual cookies) or 15-20 minutes (whole cookie pizza). Remove from oven when edges are just starting to brown. Cool and eat!

We had some extra dough, so we made a full cookie pizza also. We just let each person decorate a piece however they wanted to, but you could also do your mRNA transcription on a section of the pizza if you wanted to.

Inherited Traits chart

We had a fun time learning some genealogy as part of this unit. We asked the children's grandparents on both sides about some of their traits, and then tried to determine where we got some of our own traits based on that. 

From what we read, this is not really a very accurate way of looking at traits. I guess even the traits that are typically thought of as being determined by one gene (like attached vs unattached earlobes) , scientists are finding, are actually more complicated and less easily categorized than that. But, finding out if you can roll your tongue or not is a time-honored tradition in genetics classes, so we did this anyway. And we liked it. 

Here are some of the traits we surveyed (dominant traits are listed first):

• Unattached vs attached earlobes
• Can roll tongue into U-shape vs can't
• No widow's peak vs widow's peak
• Brown vs light (green or blue) eyes
• Index finger shorter than ring finger vs opposite
• Dark hair vs light hair
• Non-red vs red hair
• Curly hair vs straight hair

Family Traits activity

This was an activity I thought of to show how different combinations of traits can produce such differing results in siblings. There are several variations of this idea online, but nothing exactly like what I wanted, so I came up with this spreadsheet for our use. It's vastly simplified from real life, of course, but it was still fun to do.

We started out with a master list of alleles, and which were dominant and which were recessive.

Then I drew about eight different "parents." If Sam hadn't been so busy, I would have had him draw them, and then we would have had something worth sharing here. But since the focus was more on individual traits than a lovely artistic whole, it worked out okay. I made the parents very exaggated-ly have their phenotypes (big nose, hair color, etc.) and then I wrote their genotypes on the page so you could tell if they were homozygous or heterozygous.

Then we put tape on coins to show D for dominant and R for recessive. (You could just say "heads is dominant" or whatever, but actually putting the letters on helped make it more clear, I thought.)

Each set of parents had six "children." I made a spreadsheet with a list of all the alleles for each child, plus a place to write the genotypes and circle the phenotypes. Then there was a large space to draw the phenotypes for each child.

To make your "family," you would go through the following steps:

1. Choose (at random) two parents from the "parents" pile.
2. Flip a coin to determine the first child's sex. (E.g., assign female to heads/"D" and male to tails/"R")
3. Check the genotypes of the parents. If either parent is homozygous dominant, write down one dominant allele for the child to inherit. If either parent is homozygous recessive, write down one recessive allele for the child. If a parent is heterozygous, flip a coin to see which allele the child will inherit. (So, if both parents are heterozygous, flip the coin twice to see which two alleles the child gets.)
4. Once the genotype for the child is determined, circle the phenotype.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 for each trait on the list.
6. Draw what the child will look like.
7. Repeat steps 2-6 for each child of these parents.

Even though it's a little bit involved, this isn't hard to do once you understand what you're doing. I had the children work in pairs so the bigs could help the littles, but everyone had fun flipping the coins and drawing the results.

Two related videos we enjoyed:

What is a gene?

Which genetic traits are dominant?

Mitosis Cupcakes

Here is a good video about Mitosis.

This was a really simple activity, but a fun review after learning about mitosis. We were inspired by this picture here. I put the children into teams (one older and one younger child together) and each team had to show each step of mitosis on a cupcake "cell". We used colored frosting in a plastic bag with the corner cut off to pipe on the yellow frosting, and we used chocolate sprinkles to make the chromosomes. (I guess the middle two steps are kind of a zoomed-in view of just the nucleus, really.)

Everyone especially liked the splitting cell in telophase. It does look especially cute, for some reason.

DNA Replication Activity/Snack

I bet someone could come up with a better version of this activity, with foods that fit together more…naturally? I felt like there were things that would go perfectly together (like, I don't know, olives and fingers :)) but I just couldn't think of what they were! Anyway, I wanted the children to demonstrate the way DNA "unzips" and replicates, so I came up with this snack/activity. 

Before you start, learn about how DNA replication works. We really liked this video showing the process.

Then, you need four different snack foods to be your "bases". They should fit together in pairs somehow. I used square pretzels and square soda crackers for one pair (Adenine and Thymine, perhaps) and elliptical wheat crackers and slices of cheese for the other pair (cytosine and guanine, say). I tried to cut little semi-circle-shapes out of one side of each piece of cheese, so the cheese and the crackers would fit together like puzzle pieces. (Just to demonstrate more visually that they were meant to fit together.) You put a bunch of each of these "bases" onto a tray to represent the bases that are floating around free inside the cell's nucleus.

Next, for each child, I made a little tray holding one "strand of DNA." It had several base pairs lined up to make a strand (or a gene, perhaps).

Then I just had each child show me what would happen as the DNA replicated. They had to "unzip" or slide the strand apart, and then find the matching bases to complete each side of the unzipped strand. When they were done, they could see how their new DNA strand was an exact copy of the original. And then, of course, they could eat it. Yum! :)

DNA structure/ Making DNA bead necklaces

We absolutely loved making these DNA models with seed beads. In fact we liked it so much that I ended up going back to the store and getting more bead colors so we could all make a bunch more of them on subsequent days. They were just fun to make! And easy enough that, once we got the hang of it, even 5-year-old Daisy was able to do it on her own. (Although, admittedly, Daisy always has been unusually good at—and had a lot of patience for—fine motor activities.) The instructions we used are here. I found I only needed to go through about three rows with the children before they could do it totally independently.

The nice thing about these models is that they are quite accurate, though simple, and they really get across the idea of the matching base pairs. And, if you accidentally pair the wrong bases—just call it a mutation! :) Sebby made quite a few mutations on purpose in his keychains, each causing a different trait ("This one made me have red eyes! This one means I have six fingers!" etc.).

Here is a great overview video that talks about the structure of DNA.

We made both keychains and necklaces out of our bead-DNA. I think the necklaces are so beautiful! The double-helix shape can be flattened if you aren't careful, but it's easily re-twisted if necessary.

To make these, you just need two colors of seed beads in size 6/0. These will make up the sugar/phosphate "backbone" of the DNA's double helix.

And you need two colors of longer bugle beads in size #3. We used the twisted bugles because they are sparkly and pretty. :) These will be your C,T, G, A bases, so before you start, decide which colors will always pair with each other:

 Then you just need some 32-gauge wire:

Then follow the step-by-step instructions here.

Happy makers. As I said, we couldn't get enough of this. It's very relaxing to sit around stringing beads and talking.

Malachi made keychains and necklaces for all his friends in his church class. So cute.

Daisy's pretty necklace

This was my favorite set of colors. I kept one of these to wear myself! I love it.

DNA and Genetics Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

 

This was a good unit to do right before our new baby was born, because it gave us lots of chances to talk about who we really are and how much our genes determine what we are like. It was a good time to review some biology basics that we learned last time we had a baby, during our Babies Unit. And it was fun to talk about family traits (both inherited and learned), talk about baby names, tell stories about each of the other children's births, and learn some stories about our ancestors.

 

We really loved the YouTube videos by the Amoeba Sisters. They have very clear explanations of the information, and they're cute and funny too. Really well done. I've linked most of them on the specific post that's most relevant, but I'll put some of the links here as well:

 

Video about Mitosis

Video about Meiosis

Video about Mutations

Video about DNA replication

Video about DNA structure and function

Video about RNA

Video about Protein Synthesis

Video about Punnett Squares

Video about sex-linked traits

Video about the cell cycle and cancer

 

We also liked this video about Gregor Mendel and his pea plants

 

And this video about sex determination in different organisms was fascinating!

 

This movie was pretty good, about mapping individual genomes and potential cures for genetic diseases

 

Lastly, here's my Pinterest Board for our Genetics Unit.

 

Presentation at midwives' college

I just wanted to post this picture of Seb's poster for the presentation we gave at the Midwives' College in Salt Lake City. I didn't get any pictures of the day itself, but it was really fun—Abe gave a report on the risks and benefits of Ultrasound and Doppler, Seb and Malachi gave an overview of fetal development at 22 weeks (which is how far along I was at the time), and Daisy and I read aloud our very favorite book about babies. (This one.) All the kids did such a great job, and of course we always love spending time with midwives!

Homeostasis Machines

This one is Seb's crystal-growing machine

We learned about homeostasis and positive and negative feedback cycles, and then I had the children design a machine using the principles of homeostasis. I am fairly sure these wouldn't work in real life, but they looked really cool and I had fun listening to the boys tell me about them. :)

Here is a video about homeostasis.

Abe's greenhouse

Seb's roller coaster

Spinal Cord model with egg carton and licorice

I found lots of ideas for spinal cord models (this one made with a pool noodle is cool, and I liked this one with gummy rings too), but since we still had licorice from our neuron models, and since I liked the idea of having the spinal cord be thick and tough, yet flexible (rather than just represented by a piece of string as it is in the models linked above), we settled on this egg carton/licorice model.

What you need:

An egg carton to cut up, for the vertebrae

Craft foam (or something kind of spongy), for the vertebral discs

Licorice, for the spinal cord

I chose to use egg carton sections because they really do look quite like vertebrae. We tried both ways: poking holes through the bottom of the egg carton section (Abe's was made like this) and poking holes through the side of the egg carton as shown above. I think I preferred the latter way just because of how it looked, but both ways are fine.

Then you just thread the vertebrae onto the spinal cord, alternating with the discs.

We really liked the way the licorice spinal cord allowed flexibility and movement of the spine. They were fun to play around with.