Heart and lungs resources - all free of course!

Last week, as part of the "Healthy Body, Healthy Mind" unit, my children were learning about the heart and lungs and how to keep them healthy. I found some nice resources for the interactive whiteboard and other activities related to the topic and thought I'd share them with you. I used these resources with children around 7-8 years of age.

THE CIRCULATORY SYSTEM:
Finding the heart using a stethoscope on the interactive whiteboard: This one is a great way of remembering the location of the heart. They move the stethoscope about until they can hear the heart beating. 

The children did an experiment to see the effect of exercise on their hearts. This involved sitting, standing, running/dancing and hopping. Of course they loved this! Click here or on the image below to download my heart investigation sheet.

After having experimented on themselves, they then had a go at changing Ruby's heart rate in this fantastic game from the BBC Schools website. It was a great assessment tool. I asked them to make Ruby's heart rate go up/down a little or a lot.

I found a huge selection of heart-related resources on the American Heart Association website. They have heart lesson plans divided up by subject and age level. Here, I came across this join the dots activity where the children follow the route of blood through the heart.

THE RESPIRATORY SYSTEM:

After this, we moved  on to learning about the lungs. Mr. Hardy's simple flash animation shows the movements in the respiratory system very clearly.  Having watched this, we then set out to make models of the lungs. I followed these instructions except we used plasticine instead of clay. 

At the end of the lesson, the children watched this video to summarise. Again, there is a simple animation with commentary (not in the clearest English though!). This provided more detail in a visual way.

The children also designed anti-smoking posters. I found it very difficult to find classroom resources relating to the dangers of smoking that would be suitable for children who are that young. Quite a lot of the posters, videos, etc. were very gruesome. I thought this was a nice little animation to show how smoking affects the teeth, lungs, heart and brain in a not-so-gruesome manner. One word of warning - the brain is a bit scary!