Making models to play with!
We talked about the role of the kidney to clean the blood by filtering out urea. To remember this, we created a kidney labyrinth.
Red beads represented blood cells, brown beads were proteins, green beads were sugars, blue beads were water molecules, and yellow beads were urea. Red, brown, green, and some blue beads were reabsorbed by the body on the left. Yellow beads along with some blue beads were excreted on the right to form urine. We noticed that sometimes our kidney got sick: we found red, brown or green beads on the right which meant that blood, proteins, or sugars were found in the urine.
Making models as art to remember concepts!
We talked about how the organs in our body are made of cells. A cell is like a container filled with little organelles that act just like a body.
Here is a cell with all of it's organelles!
When playing turns into experimenting...
We were filling containers with water, making "soups", adding ingredients, watching them float or sink.
Then a child asked
What makes boats float ?
In this experiment, we made tin-foil boats. We saw that for the same weight (amount of tin-foil), a boat with greater surface area could carry more crates before sinking.