Studying the Heart

We are continuing to work our way through the body using Blood and Guts and The Body Book, and it's been great! The heart model, however, was a bit of a disappointment.

The Body Book model is constructed with a single top layer containing all the structures that opens up to reveal a bisected heart with vessel connections. I had them color the vessels based on oxygenated v. deoxygenated blood, not as arteries and veins. The model has several problems. The inner heart is not the same size or shape as the outer layer. The aorta is not labeled, and the three vessels coming off the top of the aorta (going to the upper extremities and the head) do not line up so when the top flap is closed it looks like there are four vessels. The labels on the pulmonary veins (the smaller red structure coming into the left atrium) are upside down. And when the pulmonary artery is lined up to match the outer layer, the part glued onto the inner hear covers over the pulmonic valve. Perhaps these errors were corrected in the Scholastic release of the book.
The book does come with two coloring sheets, one for the entire circulatory system and another a series of pictures depicting how the heart fills with blood.

The kids had fun with the activities from Blood and Guts. It comes with instructions to build a stethoscope, but why do that when you can just borrow your mom's real stethoscopes? Ds#1 and Ds#2 are listening to their brother's heart sounds (S1 and S2, or lub dub.) We also checked out most of the pulse points on the body at rest and after running up and down the hallway 10 times.

Ds#2 pulled this book of the shelf for us to read "because it goes with what we studied," he said. The Let's-Read-and-Find-Out science books are his favorite right now.