Tuesday, October 28, 2008

DI-GES-TION!

We've been studying the Human Body, this month, in science. Just an overview (or, as Tate would say, "an interview".)

Believe me, at the rate we've been going - covering a major body system each DAY (skeletal, muscular, respiratory, etc.) - we're not exactly ready for medical school. My goal was to introduce several of the systems to the boys, and for them to begin to appreciate how complex their bodies are.

We certainly take our health for granted!

I think the highlight, for the boys anyway, was our brief look at the digestive system. Of course, with three boys, anything that includes the word "feces" is immediately interesting and wildly funny. Throw Tate's hearing loss into the mix, and we've had some minor "crossed wires" between the aforementioned, and our discussions of Martin Luther and the 95 THESES, but I digest...


The highlight... that's what I was talking about...

We measured our digestive systems (don't you wonder HOW?) and made models of them. In the top picture, the boys are each holding their own model, straightened out, to show the lengths. The various colors of yarn represent the different parts of the digestive tract. The first (small) red section is the mouth, the blue is the esophagus, the yellow is the stomach, the green is the small intestine, and the last red is the large intestine.

Not content just to extend their models and look at the length, the boys decided to "shape" their models like the real thing. Wyatt decided to stretch out next to his, for a comparison, but Tate and Gunnar thought it would be even better to "model" their models!

2 comments:

leah said...

I totally wonder how you measured your digestive systems, but I'm also afraid to know the answer! ROFL.

Herding Grasshoppers said...

Okay... the measuring...

We first loosely measured the boys' mouths from front of the jaw to the back, and then the esophagus - from the top of the neck to the bottom of the rib cage.

For the stomach, we measured the width of the hand, with fingers loosely spread (not WIDE).

The upper intestine is loosely estimated at 4x your height, and the lower intestine at 1x your height.

Totally it's a LOOSE approximation, but fun to see. And having the different colors of yarn emphasized the different sections, and their relative lengths.