We began our study of the human body on the outside and worked our way in — as most Montessori learning goes! After learning all about The Outer Body, we moved on in to look at the Skeletal System, the Muscular System, the Nervous System, the Respiratory System, the Circulatory System, and now the Digestive System!
One material that we’ve been using throughout this human body study is this felt human body! It comes with templates for the major organs plus the skeleton, so I separated each system out to present one at a time. The girls loved putting together the many parts of the digestive system, and I was surprised at how quickly they learned their names and how they all connected to each other!
We also worked with some digestive system 3-part cards made by Every Star is Different, comparing each card to our felt human body to see how they fit together.
Then we got to the interesting part — what the digestive system actually does to our food!
The girls had a blast making a model stomach — we tore up some bread, put it in our “stomach” [a ziplock bag], added some “stomach acid” [vinegar], and churned it up by hand.
The girls were especially excited to learn about poop and pee, which we studied as part of our digestive system study — mostly through books!
We rely heavily on wonderful children’s books for all of our themed studies, and here are the books we used to study the digestive system of the human body:
The Usborne Big Book of the Body
The Usborne Complete Book of the Human Body
The Edible Pyramid: Good Eating Every Day, by Loreen Leedy
Good Enough to Eat: A Kid’s Guide to Food and Nutrition, by Lizzy Rockwell
The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts, by Shinta Cho
Take a Closer Look at Your Bladder, by Marne Ventura
Stay tuned as we continue to dive deeper into our human body study!
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