Thursday, September 15, 2011

Human Body Unit: Starting Off Again with the Skeleton

 Last spring we started learning a bit about the human body, but then we stopped as summer activities took over.  We have re-started our human body unit.

Before I knew I was going to luck into a zillion human body kits (see my post about being lucky!), I bought the Squishy Human Body by Smart Lab.  The kids just loved this!  We talked about how the skeleton protects all of our organs and then lifted off the rib cage and started taking out the squishy organs. What a great learning kit!
It even looks real, doesn't it?!
We are using the Human Body Copywork by Homeschool Bits as our core for this unit.  At $1.50 for 200+ pages this was a bargain! Here's a sample if you're interested.

I brought out our human body puzzle and ED and DD have done this a number of times.
The kids spent one day cutting out all the parts to the skeleton.  While they worked, they listed to our CD of Story of the World-volume 2. (We listened to the first book this summer in the car on our various trips.)
We'll be using this book quite a bit this semester. It has neat project ideas: The Body Book: Hands on Models That Teach.

The book had a number of discussion questions, so we went over those as we put the body together. Did you know the skull has 29 bodies?  Do you know what the backbone protects? the spinal chord... things like that.
 

4 comments:

  1. I'm a new follower, you've got a great blog here! Hope you'll stop by sometime.

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  2. Thanks for following, Jen! I had a quick visit to your blogs. I loved the fruit rainbow activity you did! Can't wait to have more time to browse through. ~Liesl

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  3. Wow, I really like the activities you do to bring learning alive for the children.

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  4. Oh my gosh...I am so glad I found your blog!!! My son is a science fanatic...you have amazing ideas and resources that I will so enjoy sharing with him...Thank you!!!

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