Human Body: Nervous System

We had a great time learning about the nervous system this week.  Doesn’t George look like he’s having a blast wearing his brain hat?  ;-)

We started off with a reading of the Nervous System overview in RSO and with an attempt at the lab – Reaction Time.    The idea behind the lab was to see how fast a message can move from your eyes to your hand by trying to catch a ruler that is dropped.  The results are graphed to see if reaction time increases with practice.

Well, it turns out my kids do not have fast reflexes. They each managed to catch the ruler only once, and I suspect there was a little cheating going on.  So, not much to graph.

We moved on to making the above mentioned brain hats.  Vicki’s is from Ellen McHenry and she basically just colored it in.

Georgie’s is from the Scholastic Easy Make and Learn Projects: Human Body.  It includes cut-outs to add to the hat showing the areas of the brain that control the 5 senses and movement, and also has labels showing the Cerebrum, the Cerebellum, and the Brain Stem.

We read about the nervous system in our Scholastic Kid’s Science Encyclopedia and in our general science encyclopedia.

Georgie then used a diagram in our science encyclopedia to put labels on a nerve cell diagram I found at File Folder Fun.

 

We then watched a video on the nervous system at Kids Health and watched another video on the Brain at The Children’s University of Manchester.  There was also a puzzle and a quiz following the video that Georgie did twice and then helped Vicki to do.

We finished up with Georgie reading more about the nervous system in Look at Your Body: Brain & Nerves, and making an entry in his journal about the nervous system.

Next we will do an overview/review of all the body systems, learn about the 5 senses, growth, genetics and reproduction.