How to Plan a Home School Digestive System Lesson?

Question

My cousin is home schooled and his mom wants to do a lesson of the digestive system. He's currently learning how the human body works. She's at the digestive system now. I believe she's starting at the mouth. She doesn't really know how to teach the digestive systemt hough. My cousin is 10 years old. How can she do a good lesson plan on the digestive system?

Answer 1

When I taught human anatomy to my 5 and 6 year olds, I started at the library.  The children's section usually has several basic books, written for young children, on each system of the body.  If your library doesn't, they can most likely get them through interlibrary loan--just ask a librarian for help.  I'd start by reading some such books to get some ideas myself.  And then I would read them to the kids, too.  That's where I'd start any such study.

You can check online for information, but I find the children's nonfiction section has books written at an appropriate level and they can be read and discussed together.

We made paper models of the different organs and wrote on each one its name and what it does.

We got some large pieces of paper and taped them together to make a human-sized piece of paper.  Then traced around one of the children to get a body shape.  Then used the pictures in the books to draw the different parts of the digestive system inside the body outline.  Labelled the parts.  Then taped the diagram on the wall where we could look at it as we read about the digestive system.  Or hold up a piece of food and talk about what happens to it as it goes through various parts of the digestive system (and what it might look like at various stages).

We played simple games.  

Such as a variation on Simon Says where the leader would say things like, "Simon says to point to your small intestine".

Or a variation on bingo with bingo cards made on construction paper; instead of numbers in the squares, we would write names of parts of the digestive system.  The person doing the calling would describe an organ in the digestive system or tell its function and then see if the players could pick the appropriate name on their card.

Check at your library and see if they carry any videos of the "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" series.  He has an episode on the digestive system that your cousin will probably find amusing but educational.  Or there's a "Magic School Bus" book and video about the digestive system, I believe.

If you want to get really creative, have your cousin work on building his own model of the digestive system.  Or have him do some research and put together a poster or presentation or a poem or something on the digestive system.  He might surprise you and do his own research and come up with something great on his own, especially if he knows that others will see it.

Anyway, there are lots of ways to approach this topic (and any other).  Personally, I like to make it fun and as hands-on as possible.

Answer 2

I would suggest this site:  http://www.instructorweb.com/lesson/dige... I hope this helps.

Answer 3

I think about 4 burritos ought to do it.

Answer 4

http://kidshealth.org/kid/htbw/digestive...

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/diges...

http://www.innerbody.com/image/digeov.ht...

http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/fara...

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subject...

http://www.cln.org/themes/digestive.html

http://yucky.discovery.com/noflash/body/...

http://vilenski.org/science/humanbody/hb...

It took me about 5 minutes to find this many links.   If you can't find enough information here, then go to the search engine and put in "digestive system" and find the other 36,600,000 results.   Actually, the search for "human digestive system" gives more results.  Hopefully one of them will give you the information that the mom needs to explain the system to her 10 year old.