Building the Human Body from the Inside Out

We recently finished a unit study on the Human Body and Drug Awareness. One of the books that I used for this unit study was "The Body Book" by Donald Silver and Patricia J. Wyne. I have mixed feelings about this resource.

Positive Aspects of the Book:

• Building the human body was a very valuable learning activity. I think we all have a much better understanding of where our major organs are located inside our bodies.


• The suggestions in the book of questions to ask about the human body were excellent. I often used the teacher's notes and questions in the book before we placed a body part on our skeletons. The book included objectives, building understanding, making the model, using the model, more to do and learn, making connections, and staying healthy for all of the models within the book.


• Building a model of the human body allowed for an ongoing project for our entire human body unit with an impressive end project.


• Other models were included in the book besides the large multi-part human body model. For example, we used the larger model of the heart to understand blood flow to and from the heart.

Here is my 5th grade son's completed skeleton. Our first step was to put the skeleton together. While doing this, we identified the bones and wrote the name of the bone on each piece of the skeleton. Mason decided to color his skeleton at some point during the unit study which was fine with me. About halfway through the unit study, I finally had the bright idea to take the wobbly skeletons and glue them to large pieces of cardboard. The skeletons were much easier to work with after doing that.

Negative Aspects of the Book:

• There simply were not enough PICTURES in the book to help explain the way in which the various models were supposed to be constructed. The vast majority of the directions about how to put the models together were ONLY written. Particularly toward the end of our human body model project, I could have used more pictures...even small line diagrams would have been helpful. Due to the lack of visual help, putting the human body model and the other models together was harder than it needed to be.


• Depending on who does the cutting, it is a lot of work for the instructor. The cutting is often fairly detailed. The degree of cutting skills needed was too hard for my 3rd grader. Because I only wanted to spend a small portion of our time actually putting together our various models, I did all the cutting ahead of time. Now, this did not bother me because I enjoy cutting things out (I know - weird) but I am sure that many people would not enjoy doing so much cutting.

When you open the rib cage, you can see the lungs.When you lift the lungs, you can see the heart and the esophagus.The large intestine, small intestine, pancreas, liver, and stomach are all below the rib cage.

Upon lifting the liver, you can see the pancreas and stomach much better. The stomach even has a little window you can lift and see the digestive juices inside.

The last body parts to be added were the kidneys, bladder, and ureters. We had to snip the ureters down to make them fit - that didn't seem right but we went ahead and performed the surgery quickly.
The finished human body models are impressive and I'm glad we persevered through the entire project!