Time To Draw Breath

Oh wow was this another biggey or not? Today in our little discussions that we have often, up came the subject of breathing and how the lungs work. Well last week we had discussed the circulatory system and in passing had related this to the lungs. Today it was full on with the breathing. Of course I headed straight for BrainPop but alas the respiratory animations were in the pay section. A Google on "animation and respiratory" bought up lots of references to Brainpop, which I didn't need and also to KidsHealth, which didn't quite cut it either. Then I remembered How Stuff Works. Now even though this site is more aimed at senior students than my little grade 3/4's, it does have some neat animations so over I cruised. Sure enough, in among some interesting but rather dense text, were two excellent animations showing just what I wanted. Leaving the pages up over recess, when we came in it was "on with the show". Once again the board showed it's versatility as we stopped, replayed, annotated, labeled and generally had great fun dissecting the system. The number and breadth of questions and "what if's" that were generated, (not by me I must add), were really impressive. Twenty minutes later the children were still wanting more so we had a look at another animation I had found at kidshealth dealing with asthma. That was very informative for many of the children had either direct personal experiences with this disease or knew someone who had experiences.

We didn't use the Skool.com animation in the Human Body part of the Gallery in the SMART Notebook as I thought it more suited to individuals rather than a whole class situation. I did find on the net a couple of nice short articles on breathing that soon became cloze documents in Word. I also found a neat labeling diagram at Enchanted Learning which rounded out a neat two hour session.