I would like to take a moment to thank all the parents and friends for your participation with MudPies & Butterflies as next month will be one full year. Thank you for bringing supplies, coming up with themes and activities, helping clean up, motivating your kids, helping with my kids, and mostly for having fun with it all! It has made the impact all the greater for our kids to learn, inquire, question and RETAIN so much!
Thank you for making my dream come to life - Jessica Deltac
Anatomy Fun: The Power of your BodyGuards
First we talked about scabs, bruises, scars and how our body made them. W had a round-robin of showing off the ones we all had! We even had broken bones a’ mending!
To get an idea of the building blocks involved with cuts, bruises and scabs, I replicated our bodies’ blood with cheerios for red blood cells, mini marshmallows for white blood cells and cupcake sprinkles for platelets. (Go to Anatomy fun Part 1, an earlier blog on BLOOD and more to get a better idea of how to explain blood to kids or adults!)
We explored who was first on the scene of a cut and what they did to protect and rebuild. Cupcake sprinkles and White Mini Marshmallows! When we get a cut in our biggest organ – OUR SKIN, the barrier is broken that protects us from dirt, germs and any other airborne bad things. So the scab speedily covers up the opening. (Taking it to the next level, – your initial clot is fibrin, which is kinda soft and gooshy, which is why it’s called the soft clot. Then along comes Factor XIIIa, which is present in your blood, and it joins the pieces of fibrin together into the final hard clot.)
Now onto replicating our mucous membranes and SNOT protectors! Have you ever blown your nose and found that your snot was a really gross, green-yellow color? Most of the time snot is just clear, but sometimes it will be green or yellow, particularly if you’ve been sick. (YUCK!) The color usually indicates you’ve got more bodyguards working for you than plain bogies.
With unflavored gelatin, corn syrup and water Üla helped me replicate the sticky, stretchy mucous – aka snot. Here is one recipe for making snot. We used four different recipes to come up with some pretty interesting snot and boogers.
Then to show how these bodyguards stop dirt, bacteria and other fine particles from entering our lungs I dropped in some vacuum cleaner debris. Voila – we made Boogers! Boogers are just Mucous that has trapped dirt and then can start to dry. Now with three separate kits with different ingredients I had premade, they broke into groups and became snot factories! Some boogers were made with lime-flavored gelatin, others with green and yellow food-coloring. But each was fun and disgusting enough to entertain everyone and understand how mucous is made of protein that makes it both stretchy and sticky so that it can reach where it needs to go to do its job and grab that dirt. In the nose, mucous acts as a barrier against germs, dust and other noxious substances. We breathe between 10,000 and 30,000 litres of air each day – which carries pollen, germs and a great deal of other gunk. These get trapped in the mucous surface and destroyed by white cells and enzymes.
Now to understand how the lungs work w/out that dust… How does air get into our body any how? Our lungs suck it in through our mouths and noses. Our Diaphragm is engaged upward (like the blue balloon on the bottom of my homemade bottle model of the lungs) and the lungs collapse and as the drum head of the diaphragm lowers air that is breathed in fills the lungs. We should all spend more time breathing deeply (yes, Yoga is good!) to increase our lung capacity. Because that is the source of our blood’s most valuable ingredient – OXYGEN!
Now since all the air you exhale is colorless and gets mixed up with the air in the atmosphere it’s not an easy thing to measure. And we wanted to find out how much air each of our pair of lungs could hold. We followed the standard measurement for determining lung capacity – Water Displacement from a simple experiment.
**I would have loved to have the time and the attention span for the kids to figure out a THEIR own way to do it. But that is the difference with an outdoor, free-to-roam-anywhere homeschooling group and one required to sit in their chairs in a classroom all day long.
Each kid patiently stood in line from smallest to tallest to blow one very big exhale through the tube and into the upside down bottle submerged in water. As their breath blew into the bottle, water was pushed out. And after I replaced the cap underwater and stood the bottle upright we compared how large each person’s breath was to the next. Before engaging in the experiment one of the older children (thanxA) took a sharpy pen and demarcated the line at every 2 cups of water added.
