9th Street Academy: Can you stomach this?

Well we are finally back in the swing of things!

Technically we started school last Tuesday but ...it didn't go so well.

The public school had 2 snow days (actually just freezing cold days) and so of course we had neighborhood kids knocking on the door asking to play.

And I just can't see canceling our school due to cold since we don't actually have to leave the house.

So I have this wonderful picture in my head. The kids and I work really hard for 2 hours and complete and entire days worth of work by 10 am and then they still have time to enjoy the "snow day" with their friends while I enjoy a Gilmore girls marathon

with a pot of coffee

on the couch

by myself.

You see I have this problem with "realistic expectations". All my lesson plans looked important to me. I couldn't decide what to cut out of our day. I mean learning about the Greek dark ages just cannot wait till next week!

It was horrible-I felt stressed, the kids felt stressed.

I declare the next "snow day", whatever the reason, we will completely cancel school!

Luckily this week was completely "snow day" free and over the weekend I committed myself to being more patient, more flexible, and to realize that although multiplication and spelling matter being able to correctly label a map of ancient Greece by the end of 3rd grade probably doesn't.

Anatomy

Right before Christmas amazon.com was having these great flash sales and I was able to grab one of these:

for only $9! So of course this had to be our next science exploration!

I have to admit I had been putting off doing a full study of the human body because both Kaitlyn and I are extremely squeamish but alas I have given in and I am now glad that I have.

Our first science lesson was just assembling the body. All the bones, muscles, and organs came in little baggies and had to be placed correctly inside the "skin"(the clear shell).

So we assembled our body.

The kids had so much fun-it was like putting together pieces of a puzzle and the insides were so squishy!

My only complaint is that the pieces do not fit together as well as they should. The bones and muscles had little pegs that were supposed to fit into holes in the casing and they did not always line up correctly. Also the front "skin" and the back "skin" didn't match up to well either. Despite this drawback I still think it is a great educational tool.

After our body was completely assembled we had a very heated debate as to what this guys name should be. I am happy to introduce:

Quack the Duck

And on occasion he may be called, "Mr.Bones" as well. Apparently we are still debating.

On our 2nd day studying "Quack the Duck" we decided to focus on the stomach.

So we got out our tweezers and removed the rib-cage so we could find the stomach.
The model came with this really great booklet that had information on each part displayed in the model. So after we removed the stomach we read the booklet

I though it was written in a really easy to understand format. The pictures were engaging and the kids really understood how the stomach worked by the end of the reading. At the bottom of the page it had a simple experiment to perform. You can find the experiment in the free zone at smartlabtoys.com by clicking here.

Here is what we did:

We placed a piece of bread into our stomach(a plastic bag)
We added stomach acid(water) and left half the stomach full of air.
We acted as the contracting muscles of the stomach by closing up the bag and taking turns squeezing the "stomach".

Of course if you used soda instead of water it would help "digest" the bread faster but then you wouldn't be able to see what was happening as well as you can with water.

The kids loved helping our stomach to digest! At one point Samantha went crazy squeezing the stomach and the seal broke open and some of the water splashed all over her! This lead to a great discussion about throwing up and not eating right before doing physical exercise!

At the end of the day the content of our stomach looked like this:

Pretty gross huh?

While reading and discussing the lab booklet the kids and I thought of our own experiment to help us understand why our stomach growls! Here is how to do it: