Home School - All about Me - Hearts and Pulse

Following our All about Me topic we are looking at some of the important organs in our body; last time we looked at, studied and investigated our brains.

This lesson is to investigate the heart:

WALT

• Where the heart is on our body
• What the heart does
• Finding a pulse

• How the heart keeps us healthy

The boys had a good understanding of what the heart was for and knew that it pumped blood around our bodies. Yet, with this understanding there were some misunderstandings:

Me: "What does the heart do?"

James: "It makes us love people."

William: "No, it pumps blood around the body."

James: "So it pumps love too?"

William: "No, people say they love from their heart but it's really their brains. It's why they're crazy!"

Personally, I think that probably makes a lot of sense!

The first thing we did was to find out where the heart is found in our bodies. From this point we tried to see if we could hear each others hearts beating; something that we found difficult to do.

We then discussed in depth about the heart pumping blood around the body.

The right side of your heart receives blood from your veins that potentially is oxygen-poor or without oxygen; it then goes to your lungs, where it picks up oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide. The left side of your heart receives oxygen-rich blood from your lungs and pumps it through your arteries to the rest of your body.

We then also discussed that our blood delivers nutrients, water, and oxygen and then carries away wastes such as carbon dioxide that body cells produce; this is only done through the flow off the blood that the heart pumps out.

William really liked the idea of the blood being a delivery system and actually likened it to leaves floating on a river. James compared it to little postmen delivering letters with scuba gear; I, personally, enjoyed this analogy.

The next task was to see if we could find the pulse and feel that our heart is pumping the blood around.

We discussed that the rate and pressure of the heart pumping around creates your pulse.

The best places to find your pulse are the:

• wrists
• inside of your elbow
• side of your neck

This was quite easy to find on our wrists and showed a clear result for the boys to gain some understanding.

The next part was to try and make our own heart so we could add it to our body map.

Marking out the shape of the heart from the books we used as a foundation we then  scrunched up little pieces of paper and tissue to replicate the colour and texture of a heart.

We then added the heart to our maps and in doing so reaffirmed the understanding of where it is found. Once it was placed on the map William noticed how far the blood had to travel around the body and commented that the heart must be strong to do this.

Both of the boys really enjoyed doing this. I think in comparison to the brain activity they had a more visualised topic which they could physically investigate and discover.