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The Prairie Primer really does give you a lot to think about as you go through the Little House books! Sometimes I'm not even exactly sure why it suggests studying something, like when they recommend studying breathing when you are in chapter four. The only connection to breathing that I could find in chapter four was when it said, "Pa's breath hung in the air like smoke" :) But, whatever the reason, I have been wanting to teach the children about their body systems anyway, so we started here, with the respiratory system. (To see what else we learned about while reading through Little House in the Big Woods, you can see my previous post here.) I had bought the Melissa & Doug Magnetic Human Body Play Set awhile ago, in preparation for the day we would be studying the body, and now I finally got the chance to bring it out for the kids. The set did not have a specific respiratory system, but it did have the internal organs, including the lungs, so I put those parts on the body, covered them with clothes and we started our study by talking about how under our clothes and inside our bodies are different systems that keep our bodies running, like a machine. (Any reference to machines keeps Little Man's attention!) With this play set the kids were able to take the clothes off the magnetic dolls to see the body systems underneath. I was surprised that the older two already knew where the lungs are. We have never specifically studied this before! That just shows how much kids are paying attention when we don't realize they are :) After playing with the Human Body Set we went to the living room couch to look at the page in Usborne Books See Inside Your Body that explains the respiratory system. Since the kids already knew that air goes in your mouth and nose, down your "neck" into your lungs, we were able to get a little deeper into the subject. We learned the words trachea, bronchioles and aviolas. We learned that we need oxygen, not just for breathing, but we need it in our blood too. After we had read and lifted all the flaps we put up a poster about the respiratory system, which re-emphasized the new words we had seen and has a bigger pictures of the aviolas that put oxygen in the blood stream. Next the kids took turns laying down and tracing each others bodies on brown craft paper. We hung up their paper bodies and then I got out the Anatomy Apron. This was a fun way to see where their lungs are in their body. They each took a turn wearing the apron and putting the lungs on in the right place. Then we used the suggestion in the lessons that came with the Anatomy Apron and used two balloons to show how air goes in and out of our lungs. We blew the balloons up and then held them in front of where their lungs are and let the air out of them, (right into their faces, of course, because that made it even more fun! Lots of laughs at this part! That is what the top picture is of.) The Anatomy Apron also comes with reproducibles of the body parts to photocopy and colour. The kids coloured and cut out their lungs while I read from Little House in the Big Woods. When we were done reading we glued their lungs onto their paper bodies. Something we did not do but that I have pinned and might still add in sometime is this build a lung project. It looks like fun, but we ran out of time. If you try it, I would love to hear about it! More posts you might be interested in If you enjoyed this post, please share it with others so they can enjoy it too! This post is linked up at:
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