Summer School 2024 – The Human Body

This summer we studied the human body. We began with taking a closer look at our own bodies and labeling our body parts. During our art presentation, we tested Vitruvius’s theory of human proportions using Leonardo da Vinci’s representation of the Vitruvian Man.

Next, we learned about the skeletal system and we found out that the adult human body has 206 bones!

We learned about our internal organs and we used an anatomy apron to lay out our organs in the right place.

We spent a whole week learning about the brain and the five senses. We experimented with excluding one sense and relying on another while carrying out tasks, such as walking around obstacle courses with a blindfold or listening for the gentle tapping on a metal bowl to get to a healthy treat.

We studied the digestive system and learned about where our food goes once we chew it up in our mouth and swallow it.

When we got to the circulatory system, we made our own stethoscope to listen to one another’s hearts, looked at our pulse by placing a marshmallow on a stick on our wrist, and we pretended to be red and blue blood cells circulating between our body parts and our heart and lungs to replenish with oxygen.

We had a special parent visitor, an ER nurse at the children’s hospital, telling us about what happens when somebody is admitted to the ER and how one’s vitals are taken. She also taught us some first aid skills that the children could practice on their stuffies they brought in for the special visit.

By the end of the day, every boo-boo was tended to and we had a whole hospital wing full of happily recovering patients!

Over the four weeks of summer school, as we learned about the human body, the children added each system to their life-size outlines on a piece of large brown paper, creating a multi-dimensional model of their body. The MOM children are real experts now in the amazing human body!