Meant To Teach

So, we are learning about the brain. The girls loved putting their "thinking cap" on! You can print out one of these for yourself here . We played a lot of games with this cap and pointing out the different lobes that have different jobs. I think our favorite was learning that the saying, "You've got eyes in the back of your head" has a little truth to it. The statement that people have eyes in the back of their head may have a little truth to it. The occipital lobe, in the brain, is located in the back of the head. This lobe is responsible for controlling most vision. While we may not see out the back of our head, this back area in our brain interprets the images from our eyes.

We've been learning a lot about the heart along with arteries, veins, and capillaries. So we took the time to make some blood that the girls will never forget. Here are the instructions: 1. Fill a jar with water, you could put in a little yellow food coloring to make it look like plasma. 2. Take some cheerios and put them in a zip lock back and shake them around with red food coloring. This makes the red blood cells. 3. Pour the red blood cells, white blood cells (white marshmallows), and platelets (purple pom poms) in to the jar. Then you have something interesting to look at. Along with this little activity - we filled up 5 liters of water and poured it in a huge bowl. I made the girls guess how much blood we have in the average adult size body - their guesses were 5 gallons, 10 gallons, etc. So when they learned it was just a little over a gallon, they were quite surprised. This opened up a lot of discussions like getting shot in an artery, etc.