6 little hands and only 2 little lungs to explore…the travesty…and there sits a perfectly good trachea, completely ignored.

I have so much to tell you about science (so surprising), but it hasn’t occurred as “cleanly” as I’d like.  There isn’t always a clear-cut division in our study, and when they wish to digress…well, come on.  I’m the Queen of The Digress. So bear with me as I share our bits and pieces…

I quickly discovered that to make imitations of body parts without an actual model of a body is rather pointless.  Even I wanted something concrete to hold. No problem….you knew I had a body in a cabinet somewhere. Sara’s first reaction was, “Oh no!  The body!  What’s left to know!” Agreed…they’ve studied body systems at length at school. When a significant portion of the parents are in the medical field, expect anatomy and physiology to be on the test. BUT, as I stated in my first volume, what a 5 year old learns about science can be expounded upon when they turn 7, and so on.  So if my children knew about lungs at 5, it was time to learn about the diaphragm, and intra-thoracic pressures.  How the lungs actually work is fascinating stuff.  When they get older, we can add phrenic nerves, and even more excitingly, pathophysiology.  Oh screw it…now I’m excited.  I’m going to collapse a lung and create a chest tube after lunch!  (Kidding…sort of.)

This one is easy: cut a 2-liter bottle in half, throwing out the lower portion.  Put a balloon into the cap, wrapping around the top, and then push the balloon inside-out into the bottle. Cover the bottom with plastic wrap and tape; take a piece of stiff paper and create a handle that can be taped to the plastic wrap.  Pulling it up and down will slightly inflate and deflate the balloon, showing how the diaphragm increases and decreases space inside the thoracic cavity, creating a differential pressure gradient causing the lungs to expand and contract.  And they thought they forcefully inhaled and exhaled!  Didn’t we all at some point?  Illumination is lovely! (And a little nerdy…I know who I AM.)

This experiment is a fail, but only because I am impatient with tape.  Red food coloring into water, which is pipette’d into one balloon. Bendy straw ends into water balloon and a 2nd balloon, tape shut.  Tape silly little human in the middle, and pump the “blood” between the balloons to represent the circulatory system.  Not good…well…maybe if they were smaller.  At this age, it was just a fountain-ess mess.

Again, the take-apart anatomy guy is key here.  PLUS, the parts are squishy and kind of gross, so that’s a total bonus.  This figure has a nice representation of veins and arteries, but we didn’t get into a decent discussion about the heart chambers, etc.  We were losing steam. Today, I think I’ll try to teach them how the heart and lungs work together.  They won’t care.  They’ll get distracted.  They’ll bicker.  But you know what?  If I survived 10 full-scale cooking lessons, by God, I can do this thing.

And onto the “not so great” portion of the day.  They digressed into tossing the small intestines around, rather than hearing my summary of how our experiments related to the body.  I had them measure out a 22ft small intestine, which was at least…educational.  Me getting so frustrated that I smacked a skull right out of Sara’s hands during my heart location discussion?  Not so educational.  After I apologized, we sat and had a chit-chat about experiment time vs. discussion time.  Sara’s input was along the lines of, “You’d be a great teacher if you had more patience”.  Oh honey…agreed.  I’ll work on it.  Kelly told me that I was like her video game: she tries and tries, but she can’t get to the next level.  She has to keep asking the game for hints.  All day, nothing but hints.  But then! She figures it out!  She gets to the next level of the game!

Ha…and we think they’re learning nothing from video games. Maybe I could stand to play a few. To my teaching friends, how do you effectively transition from, “Wasn’t this a fun mess to make?”, into “Now let’s take a few minutes to understand what we’ve really learned”? And when you have a pure-bred ADHD-style learner in your mix, do you just assume when they move into the window seat and stare out at the birds that they’re still hearing you? Or do you accept this as their limitation and thank God for the duration you had their attention? Teachers…HOW DO YOU DO THIS ALL YEAR?!!!