Fourth and Fifth Class
Our Living Body
The children in fourth and fifth class have been learning about the Living body.
Their focus was the skin, the heart and the lungs.
The skin’s surface is made up of tiny microscopic cells.
Cells are the building blocks of our bodies and are always being replaced.
Each time we move, fall ,wash and dry ourselves, thousands of cells are brushed off.
It takes about a month, from the time a new cell is made to when it reaches the skin.
The skin is divided into two layers , the epidermis and dermis.
Skin prevents the delicate parts inside your body from getting scratched, keeps out germs and infection and controls your temperature.
The children enjoyed taking their fingerprints.
They discovered that no two people have the same fingerprints and that fingerprints are made up of loops, arches and whorls.
They followed the instructions as follows.
The Heart
The children learned that the heart is the strongest muscle in your body. Your heart beats at least once every second throughout your whole life and it pumps blood around your body.
The pupils counted their heart beats per minute when resting and then again after five minutes of physical activity .All pupils noted how easier it was to count the heart beats after activity as their hearts were beating so much quicker.
Results were recorded in an Excel chart .
The children drew diagrams of the lungs and labelled the parts of the lungs.
A Model of the lungs was created
These are the steps that the children followed to make a model based on the lungs.
1.Push one balloon into the neck of the bottle, and fold the neck of it round the neck of the bottle.
- Cut the entire neck off the other balloon, and dispose of the neck. Stretch the remaining piece of balloon, placing it over the open end of the bottle to form an air- tight join
- Pull on the middle of the piece of rubber. The balloon gets bigger
- Let go the piece of rubber, and then push it in gently. The balloon gets smaller.
When you breathe in, a muscle under your chest, called your diaphragm, moves down and your ribs move out. This makes the space bigger and so you get lower air pressure in your lungs. Air now rushes in from outside. When you breathe out your diaphragm moves up and your ribs move back in, and the air gets pushed out.
When you pull down on the rubber, the space inside the bottle gets bigger and the air spreads out. You now have lower pressure inside the bottle, so the higher pressure outside pushes air in; the balloon is blocking the way, so it takes in the air. (This is like breathing in). When you push in the rubber the opposite happens – the air inside the bottle gets squashed up (higher pressure now) and this higher pressure pushes air out of the balloon. (This is like breathing out).
Senior Infants and First Class
Living Things – Myself – Tooth Decay
As part of our SESE programme we had been learning about human teeth and animal teeth. We learned that we have 20 baby teeth and that when we get older, we will have 32 teeth. We also looked at animal teeth and learned that carnivores have very sharp teeth because they like to eat meat.
We also spent some time talking about how important it is to brush our teeth and why we need to do it every day. We found out what happens to our teeth if they don’t get cleaned – the build-up of plaque reacts with the sugars in food to create an acid that attacks the teeth!
We conducted an experiment using hard boiled eggs to act as the teeth – each egg was placed in a different liquid (water, milk, pure orange juice, 7-up, coke, orange cordial and vinegar) and left for a week to see if it had any effect on the shell. We used the same amount of liquid and the same size egg each time to keep our test fair.
We all used a worksheet to predict what we thought would happen to each egg. The children were prompted with the following questions;
Making Predictions
- Will it stay the same?
- Will the shell crack?
- Will the shell will brush away?
- Will the shell change colour?
When we started our observations of the eggs. We were all quite shocked at the results! We used an old toothbrush to brush the eggs.
The Results
- The vinegar decayed the egg the most by entirely disintegrating the shell leaving us with a squishy egg.
- The coke cracked and discoloured the egg quite badly.
- The orange juice left a slimy skin all over the shell.
- The cordial cracked the shell .
- The milk and water had little effect.
This led to a very interesting discussion about which drinks are good for our teeth and which drinks are not so good.
