The Human Body Unit - Making Learning Gross!

What is the best way to engage students in a unit on the human body? Make it a little gross!

My students spent two weeks learning all the parts of the body and digging in deep to the content. They weren't thrilled with all the content by itself and if science should be anything, it should be fun! In comes a slew of projects, activities, writing assignments, and excitement!

We kicked our unit off by learning about the Circulatory System and the blood.

We started by reading a little about the circulatory system in our science packets. Our 5th grade team uses this as our science curriculum. It is not my favorite source for teaching, but it does beat our old science books that I can still find my name in from when I was a student. (Have I mentioned how excited I am for the Next Generation Science Standards? Science is changing folks! Hooray!)
These lessons in this packet are short and sweet and don't go in depth, so we had to do a project and our own research to learn more! 

After reading, we popped on over to BrainPop to watch a great video on the Circulatory System. BrainPop never fails to impress in my room. Students beg me to watch more videos when we are done! There are also videos on the human body, blood pressure, the heart, and the lymphatic system.

The circulatory system video was wonderful, but we wanted to focus on the blood in our body for our research and project that we were going to complete. I pulled up another BrainPop video on blood. I had students take notes on the video that they could later use in their reports.

Now watching videos on something is pretty exciting, but it isn't gross and it doesn't get students to have a hands-on approach to learning about the blood.

Enter Runde's Room. She has some great ideas and I couldn't have done this lesson without her wonderful post which you can find here:
http://www.rundesroom.com/2012/10/our-classroom-was-covered-in-blood-today.html

We grabbed our (reused) water bottles, cheerios that I dyed red, salt, yellow food coloring, and marshmallows and set to work. Jen from Runde's Room explains the steps in detail on her blog, so I won't go into much detail about that, but my students rocked this activity.
My students were hooked on blood by the time we finished this! It was only natural to continue that excitement and research in depth about our blood.

My school is very fortunate to have Chromebook labs on all 3 floors in our building, so we grabbed those and set to write a research report on the 4 parts of our blood: plasma, white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. I set my students up to use Google Classroom at the beginning of the year and we absolutely love it! I could write a whole other blog post on Google Classroom (which I will one of these days). They used the research notes sheet (attached in this post) to record their findings and then presented that information in an expository text on Google Classroom.
The great thing about Google Classroom is that you could have your students create a powerpoint presentation, an essay, or anything else you can think of pretty much!

When they were finished with their essay we graded it using a pretty standard rubric, which I have also included.

What did my students get out of this lesson?
They were engaged the ENTIRE time, which doesn't always happen. They were able to experience the blood model first hand, they got their hands on some technology, and they wrote at the end of it all! I could not have asked for much more than that!

Check out my next post on the Respiratory System Project!


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-vrpG2Ue121Q0FITXFoazlEdlE/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-vrpG2Ue121VVExQ1JwT19UOE0/view?usp=sharing