Play School: My Guts

First, an update on the rock candy we made during our lesson on rocks. It took an entire month to grow enough crystals for this to be candy, but it was worth the wait--at least the girls think so! Unfortunately, I only made one, so they had to share. They didn't mind.

This was a fun, although long, experiment. The girls loved checking on their rock candy every day after lunch and seeing the crystals grow bigger and bigger.

This week's lesson continued our unit on the human body: My Guts (or, in other words, "Inside My Body")

Concepts: What are my guts? What do they do? How do they help me play, talk, laugh, and help others?

Books: The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen; Thump-Thump: Learning About Your Heart by Pamela Hill Nettleton; Breathe In, Breathe Out: Learning About Your Lungs by Pamela Hill Nettleton; and What's Inside? My Body by Angela Royston

Activities: We focused mostly on our brain, heart, lungs, and stomach, although we also talked about our blood a little bit. We talked about how our brain is like our body's computer and it sends messages to the rest of our body. I told the girls to use their brain to send a message to their feet and kick, or send a message to their hands and wave. We listened to each other's heartbeats with our play stethescope and squeezed and relaxed our fists to mimic the pumping of our heart. We felt our chests to see how it rose and fell when our lungs filled with air and then emptied out. I couldn't find a balloon but I was going to blow one up to show how our lungs work. We listened to each other's stomachs gurgling and talked about how our food goes into our stomach. We looked at the veins in our wrists and elbows and talked about how our blood flows all through our body. The girls really thought that was neat! Helena kept pointing at her teeny tiny little veins and saying "My blood is in here!"

Sensory Bin: I was going to fill the bin with cold, cooked spaghetti (you know, like the "brains" in children's haunted houses) but I chickened out--too gross! So our bin has black and white dry beans and an assortment of neon colored Halloween shapes--snakes, bats, spiders, skeletons, etc.

Letter of the Day: F is for Family. I never remember to take pictures of our letter projects, but we are hanging them all on a clothesline in the girls room. It's fun to see what we come up with every week!