Human Biology is not something I have ever been that interested in. I like science but the science that involves experiments, chemical reactions, forces anything really but not the human body. However my kids are completely fascinated by the human body so fascinated that it has been a bit of an ongoing, in the background, type theme for the past few months. We will spend a week or so reading some books, talking about it, answering questions using our Squishy body and then the kids move on to their next topic but sure enough in 3 or 4 weeks time we end up back reading our body books, answering more and more questions and so the pattern continues. What has been wonderful about this pattern is each time the kids come back to it they have clearly had time to process some of the information and their understanding is better and they ask more and more detailed questions.
We started off with some books that we checked out of our local library and our Usborne Questions and Answers about the Human Body book. It was a great way to get them curious about the body and the Question and Answer book answered a lot of their more basic questions. Then they progressed onto this lovely Usborne book – See Inside Your Body (Usborne Flap Books) (Usborne See Inside)
.
This book is amazing it makes learning about your body interesting and gives lots of information without totally overwhelming and confusing you. The book is broken down into these sections
- Your amazing body
- Eating and excreting
- Breathing air
- pumping blood
- Bones and muscles
- Brain Power
- The senses
- Drinking and weeing
- Body words
The illustrations are incredible.
I was so encouraged by how much the kids were learning by just reading their books and I really wanted to encourage them so we bought this – Smart Lab Squishy Human Body
Talk about hands on learning. The kids get to take apart and rebuild the body.
And it comes with a sheet called an Organizer – a page with diagrams and labels of all the body parts so the kids can place the body parts on the sheet and learn what each part is called.
We all love it yes even me who never enjoyed biology actually enjoys spending time with the kids learning with the Squishy Body. The detail is more than I expected. The way it all fits together is incredible.
The model comes with a booklet which talks about the different parts but we have actually not gone through the booklet in detail yet. The kids used the summarised instructions and they have built the body over and over again. As they build the body we talk about the different parts – the skeleton, the muscles, the organs and the fact that everything is covered in the shell (which would be our skin).
We have already spend hours with both our See Inside the Body book and our Squishy Human body but I have no doubt that we have only scratched the surfaces of how much we are going to use these two resources in our home learning. And shock and horror for me I am for the first time actually enjoying learning about the human body alongside my kids.
All the items that I have mentioned in this post are items which we purchased ourselves.
I have included affiliate links in the post. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will be the same.
(I bought ours a few years ago and it has so far been that most used Maths resources that we own). In fact I will probably be buying some extra items to add to our set very soon (I want to expand it so both kids can use it together – so need some more hundreds and thousands) but before I invested in our set we had a very simple home-made version of Base 10 using craft sticks.
over 4 years ago and we have used them soooooooooo many times.
ofamily learning together 