Human Body Unit

click to enlarge

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

Potato Osmosis activity

We talked about semi-permeable membranes and how nutrients, oxygen, and other things pass from the capillaries to the cells, or the alveoli to the capillaries, by diffusion or osmosis. This simple activity demonstrates the effects of osmosis. You cut a potato in half and put half of it in plain water and the other half in salt water. Then wait a few hours. (Put the cut side facing down; this picture shows it after we'd already turned it back over.) 

(White dish) Because there is a lower concentration of water in the salt water (the salt is "taking up" some of the space), the water in the potato cells moves out via osmosis. That makes the cells "floppy" or flaccid, since they have lost some of their water. You can feel that the potato is squishy and limp.

(Clear dish) The potato in the plain water stays firm and crisp. Because the concentration of water on the outside of the potato (in the dish) is the same as the concentration on the inside (in the cells), no osmosis occurs, and the cells stay firm and maintain their shape.

For another explanation of this, see here.

Heart Cookies

Not sure there is much to say about this. We made heart cookies. The little kids just used regular-shaped hearts and frosted them in sections with purple (unoxygenated blood) and pink (oxygenated blood) to show how blood flows through the heart. They had to show me the four chambers and describe the path of the circulation. (These cookies aren't pictured—the hearts below were just our leftovers!) Abe actually tried to shape his cookie into a real heart shape, though, and show the valves and the septum and so forth. I loved the way his cookie turned out!

Here are some other edible heart models you could make with graham crackers.

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.

Blood typing activity

You know what's really fun? Testing your blood to find out what type it is. I already knew my blood type, but I wanted to do this activity anyway because its so fun smearing your blood around on the little test circle and seeing it clot (or not)! I highly recommend it.

And since none of the kids knew their blood types, it was extra fun to find them out! I ordered these blood typing kits from Amazon (the five-pack) and we would have happily used a couple more. They are very simple to use; just make sure you read the instructions and have everything set out and ready before you start.

I told the kids the finger-prick wouldn't hurt. And it didn't. But some of them were a bit offended by it anyway. (Here is Daisy pretending to be offended.) It did help to soak the fingers in warm water first so the blood would flow. Although with Abe, our first subject, the blood flowed a little TOO well and got everywhere! So we soaked the later kids for a little less time. You really don't need much blood. You don't need to saturate the entire circle with blood like they do for an infant PKU test. You just need enough to react with the antigen.

And here are the finished samples! Kind of fun to have them all collected on little cards like that.

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.

Plant and Animal Cells through the microscope

We started this unit with an overview of cells: their structure and composition, and how they work. This was a bit of a review, since we talked about the structure of neurons quite a lot during our nervous system unit. It was interesting to see how, even though the basic parts are the same, the different types of cells in the body can look (and function) so different(ly) from each other! We just learned very briefly about what the organelles do, since that wasn't really the focus of this unit. We did get more in depth about the ribosomes and the nucleus later, as we talked about DNA replication and protein synthesis.

Skin cells at two levels of magnification

Leaf cells (not sure what kind of leaf it was) :)

I remember, very fondly, making a cookie model of a cell in 9th grade Biology, and sometime maybe if we have a unit on just cells, we'll make models too. But I decided against it this time since, again, that wasn't really the main focus. However, I did think it would be very useful to see some cells and get an idea of how they make up all living things, so we got out the microscope and looked at some plant (onion, carrot, leaf) cells, and some animal (skin, blood) cells. We were amazed how much we could see with just our small microscope!

We used some fountain pen ink to dye the onion skin cells, and that was cool. The cells are so neat and orderly! You can see how much structure the cell walls provide. And we were pleased to be able to see the nuclei so clearly with the ink dye.

We also were surprised to see the chloroplasts moving around in and between leaf cells (shown in the video above)! We learned that chloroplast movement helps transport proteins in and between cells, and also allows the chloroplasts to get better access to sunlight, so they don't get stuck somewhere shady and become unable to make chlorophyll. Pretty amazing to watch it happening.

Blood cells—a bit blurry

The blood cells were really interesting too. They were moving around right at first, but the blood dried quickly and then they didn't move. We only looked at blood in the first place because I accidentally cut myself on one of the microscope slides, but then it was so cool that we wished we could look at more of it. I tried to poke myself with a pin but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't draw blood! I wished I had one of those poker things they use for your finger when you go back donate blood. We didn't think we saw any white blood cells (although that might be one near the top right edge?), and we would have liked to find some, so we'll be looking for another opportunity next time someone gets hurt around here. :)

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.

 

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