Human Body...God gave us a brain!

This week we started a unit on the Human Body. Each week we will be focusing on a specific area and this week we learned all about the brain. We are using this book from Teacher Created Materials and when we are finished we will have a paper replica of our bodies.

Each week we will add body parts to our life size mural. Micah decided he would volunteer for the tracing while Noah took the pictures.

These are a few of the books we read to learn more about this amazing part of our bodies.

We finished up the week with some fun experiments.

This first one is called "Reading Rainbows" . We read the words on the list as fast as we could and then we read the list again saying the color that the word was written in. Which one is easier to do?

Explanation: Different areas of the brain have different jobs and it sends the info to two different places so your brain gets confused. The dominant part of your brain is the part that understands language so it is easier to name the color that the word spells out.

We tried "Think Fast, Act Faster" to see how long it takes for our bodies to react to messages from our brain.

And of course, we had to try to spin like a top and learn about how our bodies balance themselves...all in the name of science!!!

Micah taking his turn. We had to try this one about 10 times to make sure our research was accurate. ** smiles**

We also learned that not only do we have a dominant hand but that we also have a dominant eye. The boys were also very interested to find out that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

This is the book we are using for a lot of the experiments we will be doing over the entire unit. It has some great ideas with easy to gather materials which is a must around here!

I picked this book up at the library and we have had a lot of fun with it. Some of the tests include....

• Optimist/Pessimist
• Introvert/Extrovert
• How observant are you?

We also checked out some optical illusions online and talked about how and why they work.

We had a great week and the boys are looking forward to next weeks topic....the heart!