The Body - A Kindergarten Unit of Study

Today was our final day studying the body in our Kindergarten Homeschool Options class.  Since we only met for 4 times during this unit our focus was primarily on blood and what it does for us and how it helps fight against germs that are everywhere even though we can't see them.  Last week we each had the opportunity to make a hand print on a gelatin petri dish.  Over the week I let the dishes grow at home and today I shared the results with the kids.  They were amazed that that many germs grew and were once on their hands.  We wrote all about it in our journals, pictures included.

 We then reviewed the parts of blood and what the different types of germs (mainly bacteria and viruses) are.  We talked about how the different germs attack our body and make us feel sick and how our white blood cells and antibodies fight against the attack.  Then we brought out the play dough and got to work recreating bacteria, viruses, white blood cells, antibodies and red blood cells.

 We also finished up our body maps which now represent many different organs as well as bones and muscles within our body.  They also show things that are most important to us and how we identify ourselves.  It was a fantastic day of learning.  Next up ... archaeology.

Options Kindergarten 10-17

I apologize that it has taken me so long to get this posted!  We had such a fantastic time in kindergarten on Friday.  We kicked off our section of the body unit about germs and had a blast doing it!  We started the day with the great glitter germ experiment.  Adding some glitter to my hand before shaking everyone's hands in the class caused our "germs" to spread everywhere!  We all had germs on us, on the pillows, on the carpet!  The glitter germs were everywhere!  We read a few stories explaining about germs and then we set off writing our own stories about germs.

 We spent plenty of time recreating viruses and bacteria, white and red blood cells, and playing with them to recreate what happens.  There were many white blood cell play dough pieces that "ate" pompom germs!  We had "blood veins" made from red rolls of paper and immediately had the good blood cells attacking the bad germs!

 Using gelatin plates we made handprints of each child and I'm HOPING they turn out fantastic for us to examine our germ growth on Friday.  We painted germs and wrote in our journals about germs as well.

We're continuing our "Body Percussion" unit during music time which encourages stomping, clapping, patting and snapping.  That snapping is hard to do!  In math we worked on counting by 10's and explored base 10 blocks.

We had a fantastic day of learning and I look forward to another great day on Friday!

Who We Are: A Month Long Body Study

We had such a great time kicking off our unit about bodies and blood today!  Before I get to the ooey gooey details I'll share that we're doing fantastic with our reading lessons.  We learned about the sight word "the" by practicing touching our top teeth and sticking out our tongues to say the /th/ sound and then opening up the sound in our mouth to say "the".  We're using the Amazing Action Alphabet mini reader books to practice blending letter sounds to read words.  We're also learning about vowels and consonants.  Being able to sort vowels and consonants helps us to identify them as we learn advanced phonics such as vowel teams to make the long vowel sound.  (Note: each child only participated in one lesson, the letters and sight word lesson or the vowels and consonants lesson, whichever was appropriate for them.)

 Now for the ooey gooey stuff!  We had so much fun learning about blood and bodies today.  We started off listing questions and curiosities about blood on our wall chart.  Then we watched the video called "The Bloodmobile" by They Might Be Giants.  By dissecting the song we learned about the parts of blood (red blood cells and white blood cells is all this week).  As each item came up I dumped our pretend version of the "blood" into our "vein" containers.  We also explored the different jobs that the blood does through the song and added the foam representations to our "vein" as we learned about them.  Following the introduction we got to dive in and explore the "blood"!  We talked about being brave enough to touch it because it was a little ooey gooey for some of the kids.  It was fascinating watching the kids play with the pieces and act out delivering the "messages" and "taking out the trash".  They even had the white blood cells fighting off the germs.

 We were then able to take the opportunity to write about what we were exploring in our journals.  We added pictures (and learned how to draw people) and words to match our experiences.  Each child got to sit in the teacher's chair and share their learning with the whole group.  They are getting so good at sharing their thoughts loud and clear for everyone to hear.  The next step in exploring the human body was to color and cut out life size organs and add them to our body maps that we've been working on.  Today we added a brain, face, lungs and the heart to our bodies.  We'll continue adding the other basic elements (muscles, bones and digestive system) next week.  By the time we're done adding to our body maps they'll be quite elaborate and display both things that physically exist and images that demonstrate the passions in our hearts and brains.

 Every Kindergarten day strives to have enough time to throw in some painting :).  During our math time we learned about dominoes and dice and got to play and explore with them.

Here is my own little buddy enjoying his day at Options today.