Human Body and Nutrition Activities

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This year, for science, my son and I are using Galore Park Junior Science 1. For chapter 1, my daughter had not yet begun preschool, so I decided to play up the chapter into a human body unit for both of my "students." With pregnancy as a distraction, this became my daughter's busy box activities for much of the last two months. The first part of the chapter was about the human body in general, with a bit of emphasis on digestion. My daughter has been obsessed with the digestive system since she potty trained six months ago, so I focused on the rest of the body. The second part of the chapter was about nutrition, followed by teeth and bones. Here are some of the human body and nutrition activities I did with my preschool daughter and my elementary-aged son. She loved the body part cards from A Teaching Mommy. I put "Can you find your ....?" on each card. She and her friend (who came for a play date) really found it fun when I pretended to get things wrong. We played a matching game, and I resurrected a file folder game that I printed out back in February. My favorite activity was the play x-rays that I found on Tried and True blog. I printed a 1-10 puzzle of a child for her to practice her numbers in order from A Teaching Mommy. With her big brother, we played a simple nutrition game following the example on Stay-at-Home Educator.   Finally, she and I enjoyed reading some books about the human body. Her favorites include The Flip-Flap Body Book and Look Inside Your Body. My emphasis with my son was a bit more detailed, of course. I decided to focus on the portion of the text about diet and nutrition. We made a food pyramid and filled it in using the food category cards from Life Over C's. We also used a powerpoint about nutrition that I purchased from TeachersPayTeachers to review vitamins and minerals in a bit more detail. My son delighted in the assignment from the textbook to pretend to be a dietitian. He decided to write a letter to the "Junk Food Monster." Here is his letter.

Dear Junk Food Monster, Junk food is not good for you. Junk food has lots of fat and sugary carbohydrates. You are skipping vitamins and minerals. If you eat too much junk food, you could get overweight, get tooth decay, and get heart disease. Instead of junk food, you should eat starchy carbohydrates, proteins, dairy, fruit, and vegetables every day. It is okay to have some junk food every once in awhile. If you will eat the good food, you will grow bigger and stronger. You could be the “Big Monster” or “Strong Monster” instead of the “Junk Food Monster.” From Dietitian Raisin

For the parts on teeth and bones, he and I labeled the teeth and the parts of the teeth via a worksheet we found. Then I let him create a brochure about some that we had learned about (in brief) that he wanted to learn more about in detail. He chose to learn about diabetes. He had fun finding information on kidshealth.org. Unfortunately, he did not understand the concept of "rephrase in your own words" and "plagiarism." We'll work on that! How do you weave together the learning of your littlest ones to your oldest kids' work in your homeschool?