Science Week - THE HUMAN BODY! (Monday)

As there an endless amount of things to learn, and only so much time to learn them in, teachers are often forced to teach the subjects that are assessed most (reading, writing, maths) and other subjects such as science and the arts, get left behind. 

Myself and Archana didn't want to leave those subjects behind. They are still an important part of our students learning. At our students age (8/9 years old), they are old enough to start understanding more complex scientific ideas and should be challenged in this way.

Last term we had two weeks where we learnt about plants - we read stories about plants, wrote about plants, did experiments with plants. At the end of the term I asked the students (in a digital survey) what 'science' topic they wanted to learn about next, and they chose the human body! 

Today I introduced the unit. 

We discussed our goals..

I talked a lot about how we are not going to use words like "tummy", we are going to challenge ourselves to use the proper scientific words. If we don't know them, we are going to learn them!

Then we watched this video...


As we watched, I would pause the video and ask questions to clarify understandings and check for connections made. It was awesome! For example, I paused at 1.00, and asked students what were some bones in their body? They all said and pointed to their spine, anklebone, skull, shoulder blade etc. Having a video kept them interested and broke up the conversation as we could watch, discuss, watch, discuss, watch, discuss, instead of me lecturing them for half an hour.

As our first goal was to 'name at least 3 systems of the body', we aimed to complete this goal after watching this video. Here are some student blog posts explaining 3 systems of the body in their own words.

Hiria - 
Digestive system-when you eat it go down your body and the nutrients go away and the one you don't need you poop it out.
muscular system-the function is that the muscular make you talk,run,walk,move and everything.
nervous system- your bairn make you stand up and it send you a messege to make you move.

Isaia - 
digestive systems function the food takes out the nutrients go to the blood then the rest that  the food tears into poop.
 muscular systems is your muscles one of your muscle is your bicep brachii.

Dziah - 

the function is  your stomach and your intestines 

the function  is your  muscles and where you get strong

the  function is your lungs and where your heart is on the other side on your left.

So with varying degrees of success and accurately, but we continue non-the less. They will get the chance to revisit this learning throughout the week and make connections as learn about the various organs which are involved with different bodily systems.

Even if they didn't quite understand what each system did, they at least got exposed to some of the scientific language we will be learning throughout the week!