Human Body Preschool Lesson

I love autumn! I love the colorful leaves and crisp air; I love the pumpkins on porches (and in my bread!) It's also refreshing to get a second "new year" feeling so many months after January first. After all, school is starting, including my third (THIRD?) round of mom-preschool with SourPatch. We keep doubling in numbers; we've gone from two kids to four kids to seven kids. Feeling daunted but determined, I did my first week of preschool at our home last week, and I feel like it was a success.

So we've done an alphabet theme and a literature theme preschool; now we have a "all-sorts-of-topics-under-the-sun" preschool, coupled with a letter and number of the week. Deep breath. Fortunately, my topic for Tuesday was the human body, and boy howdy, I have a passion for it. The human body is incredible; now to just show these children how incredible! 

To try to tap into the "imagination mode", we based out preschool on the "Inside Your Outside" book, a doctor-Seussish journey through the human body. Therefore, I passed out tickets and required the kids to climb through our magical "machine" before we began.

Once through our "machine," we followed along in the book and started with our brain. After reading about the left and right sides of our brain, worked on some fine motor skills with our letter and number of the week. We practiced writing the letter "C" and number "4" to exercise our left brain, then colored a picture to exercise our right brain. I love the letters of all sizes that the Measured Mom puts on her blog (for free!) There are lots of great coloring pages such as this free download from education.com. The number four page I accessed through SourPatch's participation in Waterford's upstart program (which we love.)

Brain duly covered, we moved on to the skeleton. Our boys are transfixed by this Dem Bones book, and the preschool loved this semi-dancing video to go along with it. We also sang Hinges after discussing joints.

Since another mother is covering the Five Senses in an upcoming lesson, we moved on to the muscles. An active, large-motor activity here seemed like a must. Ergo, I made a giant, active animal dice (die, but that sounds weird, right?) and let each child have a turn rolling it. All of the kids then used their muscles to imitate the animal; they crawled like crabs, waddled like penguins, flew like birds, hopped like kangaroos... you get the picture.

For the heart section, I pulled out my stethoscope (helps to be a nurse here...) and let them listen to their own hearts beating. One or two weren't terribly impressed, but most got a magical look on their face. They were listening to their very own hearts pumping their blood. I'm glad they caught the wonder of it. The heart is incredible, after all. I also tried to get them to take a quick listen to their lungs while they were at it.

We read through the digestion/urinary part and then were about to wrap up with my grand sticker finale, when I noticed the liver was overlooked. Though I tried to let it go,  I couldn't; the liver is so fascinating and important. However, after finding some really informational videos clearly aimed at adults... I showed them this very, very obnoxious liver video for children. Still not sure if I made the right choice, but they were attentive...

So, to wrap up, I bought (what I consider) to be an extremely cool sticker set of organs in the body from Oriental Trading Company (on a free shipping day, naturally). I knew it might be a lot for preschoolers; I'd toyed with the idea of adding stickers as we talked about each part but quickly abandoned it as preschool kept rolling.Yes, the kids were excited for the stickers. I put up a completed sticker chart for them to copy and then tried to talk them from head-to-toe on how to assemble it. I'd say a third of them ignored me and went right to placing stickers everywhere and anywhere on the torso, a third sort-of-followed along, getting organs in roughly the right spot. The last third were meticulous; it was adorable to watch them carefully, carefully put each sticker in just the right spot.

Probably the most popular body activity we did was this one inspired from this blog's All About Me snack idea: body pizzas. Using a cookie cutter, I punched people shapes out of tortillas to represent skin. Next, I spooned sauce onto each of their "crusts" for them to spread out while we discussed what our blood does. Shredded cheese represented bones followed by pepperoni as muscles. The kids really seemed to enjoying making (and eating!) them.