Home School - All about Me - The Brain

As part of our All about me Topic we have been discovering different parts of our body and finding out what they are used for.

We started off by making a Body Map and took some of our basic measurements that we can track over the course of this topic. The next aspect I wanted to do was our brain and what it is and how it helps us.

I started off by showing them 2 different photos of human brains.

I explained that the brain is like a powerful computer that stores our memory and controls how we think and react.

We then listed the different things that our brain makes us do. Both of the boys had great ideas on what their brains did.

William was more philosophical and wanted to talk about the fact that his brain makes dreams of different things. He also shared his views on how the brain controls different emotions. I am still unsure if this is his understanding or down to the film Inside Out; either way it showed that he had some understanding.

James was much more black and white with his ideas. He said his brain makes him run, move and hungry. He was also under the impression that it controlled what he wanted to eat and what he enjoyed.

I extended the basics and told them that the brain is the centre of the human nervous system, which works like a string net across our bodies controlling our thoughts, movements, memories and decisions. I hoped with this that it would show that both of the boys were right with their understanding.

I also told them about their brain and sleeping/dreams which they loved these facts!

While your body rests at night, the brain is actually still active. Brain activity while sleeping is quite high: assessments say that the brain re-organises thoughts, processes the day you’ve just had and prepares itself for a new day.

Dreams lasts between 2-3 seconds at the most. We mostly do not remember our dreams, just the ones that we have close to when we wake up.

Your brain keeps on growing until you are about 20 years old. By then the brain has made lots of links which it no longer needs so it is able to shed any unwanted connections and still have billions of brain cells left to cope with whatever you may want to do. You can still make new connections even when you are 100 years old!

Using pink card we drew a brain. The boys really enjoyed doing this but my only problem was that I wished we had done more with it as I found it a little dull; I must put more imagination into the craft part!

Remembering what we have learnt we then made thought bubbles that we would attach to the brain on our body maps.

The Boys really enjoyed doing this and it was great to start filling up our body map! They came up with some great suggestions and with seemed to take in all that we looked at.