At the Neighborhood School we have been studying our bodies and how they work. The more we learn, the more amzaing and wonderful our bodies area. We’ve done lots of different activities to help us learn. We examined our skin, “the bag we live in”, with our eyes and under a magnifying glass to see all of its little parts that let our skin work for us. We [word missing in source] our finger prints, and sure enough, we are all different from each other.
We learned what an incredibly strong muscle our heart is and how it works, non-stop, to get all of our blood, mixed with oxygen from our lungs, through our entire body, and back again for more. We measured our pulse rate and saw how much harder our heart works for us when we exercise. We listened to our own heart beat with a stethescope, and we really enjoyed examining a heart from a cow.
We examined some cow bones we found on our camping trip last year to see the many different shapes and sizes our bones have. We could see the different ways our bones fit together to make different types of joints. A shoulder, joint from a cow showed us how the bones are covered with cartilage to keep the bones from rubbing against each other. We had fun playing games that taught us the names of some of our bones.
We learned how important our kidneys are for filtering our blood, and how our muscles work in pairs to move our bones.
We learned how we were made inside our mothers, getting genes from both our mothers and our fathers, and how we grew there until we were ready to come out into the world.
In art we each made an organ shaped pillow which we all stuff into two clear plastic skins, a male and a female. They’re a little like the invisible woman we saw at the Museum of Science and Natural History, only softer and prettier. As another art project, we used our bodies and projector lights to cast shadows on paper, which we traced around and painted to make large colorful murals, which we’ve hung at school.
Originally published in The Paper, March 1978.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: The source omits a word in “We our finger prints”; an explicit marker is retained. The printed “amzaing,” “bodies area” and “stethescope” are retained.
Original source: SD_Times1978_03.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
