The Human Body

The pre-interview:
Seth: We have blood cells. There's good germs and bad germs. If you fall, you'll get germs. You have lots of blood. Inside you the blood is blue, and outside you, it's red.

Hannah: You have lungs and a heart and molecules and blood and blood cells and a brain and eyes. Without a body we couldn't do anything, and without a spirit, our body couldn't do anything.

I checked out a few books from the library...the simplest and funniest being "Armpits to Zits" which was an alphabet book of body parts and a little about them. It was pretty fun. We covered the muscular system and nervous system most specifically. We learned different types of muscles...how nerves and receptors work. We talked about the different areas of the brain and what parts of your body they control. I let them sort of lead the discussion...going more into detail about the stuff they were most interested in.

Seth's preschool had done this next activity with the whole class, and I sort of stole it and made it my own. Obviously, it was going to be different doing it with two kids, instead of a whole class. But basically, we pretended that we were inside a giants body, and we were cells and such, doing various jobs. I labeled the couch as the brain, the cedar chest as the heart, and the entertainment center as the lungs. Then we acted out some different scenarios. Such as:

• the blood cells picking up oxygen in the lungs and returning to the heart and then being sent to the rest of the body...
• the giant fell and scraped his knee, and a germ got in the cut...so the white blood cells took care of that germ!
• the giants cut was bleeding, so a coagulant came and helped the red blood cells stick together and form a "shield"
• the giant got his shots and the "weak measles germ" was sent in through the "needle" and the white blood cells took care of it...the antibody watched the white blood cells do their work, so he could remember for the next time. Then the "real measles germ" entered the giants body, and the white blood cells didn't know what to do, so the antibody showed them what he had learned...and they were able to kill the measles germ.

This was a surprising lot of fun. The kids loved it, and they wanted to do it again and again.

Here is Miss Oxygen waiting in the lungs for the blood to pick her up.

Here is Miss Germ coming in the cut.

Here is Captain Antibody, saving the day!

And here is the coagulant helping the red blood cell stick to the other red blood cells. (The coagulant was being very goofy.)

Then I had Seth lay down on a big piece of paper and I traced the outline of his body. I let the kids loose with markers, string, and popsicle sticks, and they tried to recreate the body. The toilet paper tube was all Hannah's idea. It's the esophagus. They kind of got bored before the whole body was finished, but they had fun while it lasted. I loved the red and blue string for the blood vessels.

Post- Interview:

Seth: A coagulant makes all the blood cells stick together and make a shield. The brain sends messages to your feet. Your bum is the biggest muscle. (When this little fact was read, it was followed by 20 minutes of intermittent giggling.) Your elbow is a joing and helps you bend. Germs come and white blood cells surround it until the germ dies. And Mr. Antibody teaches white blood cells what to do to fight.

Hannah: Your belly button is a scar. Your heart pumps the blood to all your body. The white blood cells kill the germs. There's really such thing as the antibody, and it saves the day. (She had thought this was just a joke). There's two sides of your brain. You have a brain stem. You feel dizzy if those things in your ear don't work.