I keep saying it, but it’s worth saying over and over again that nature can be used to teach SO many things! The more we do nature study and observation the more opportunities I see.

 

 

We’ve been focusing a bit on learning more about the human body lately. We’ve studied the human body in the past, but it had been awhile and we needed to go over things a bit and elaborate more. So this past week we started reading from an encyclopedia of the human body, which we had gotten from the library, about the respiratory system. We’ve also spent a lot of time the past couple of weeks observing frogs and toads and learning all about them too; so it presented a unique opportunity to contrast the human respiratory system versus the respiratory system of frogs and toads.

 

 

Before we released our Green Frog Misty back into the wild we closely observed how the area under her chin expands and shrinks every time she breathes in and out. The following website gave us a demonstration of how that works: Frog Respiration. We also watched the lungs video at the following website to learn even more about the way we breathe: How the Body Works – Lungs Video.

 

 

The kids divided a paper in half and compared and contrasted the two different respiratory systems. A couple of the differences that were listed are how we have our diaphragm below our lungs which does the work that the muscles in a frog’s throat does and frogs can take in some air through their skin which of course humans cannot. They also listed some things that are alike such as we both have lungs, and breathe in good oxygen and send out carbon dioxide.

 

In addition, we talked about how the frogs/toads breathed when they were still tadpoles, opening up a discussion on how animals breathe underwater through gills.

 

We also used the following website to contrast the respiratory systems of birds and reptiles as well:  Vertebrate Lungs.

 

I plan to use this contrast/compare method throughout our lessons on the human body. Such as when we learn more about the digestive system we’ll contrast that as well with one of our latest “pets” from the wild! It is truly amazing how much more interested my kids are when things are made hands-on!

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This entry was posted by Melissa on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Amphibians, Frogs, Toads, and Tadpoles, Nature Study. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.