Our Body - Week 1 Body Parts - Day 2 Muscles

Tuesday - Muscles

Teaching Elements for today are:

• We each have muscles
• Our muscles are necessary for us to move
• Our muscles are elastic
• Our muscles grow to help us get stronger
• Our tongue and heart are muscles
• We have voluntary and involuntary muscles

Beginning Discussion - Focused on the elements above and exploring our bodies to feel our muscles and moving to test out our theories.

Language - We worked on our movement sight words: play, on, see, look, run, in, up, into, ran, jump, down, went, came. We mixed them up, created commands, and acted them out.

Math - To test our strength, each child pushed down on a scale to see how much force they could apply. 

We graphed the results and discussed who had more, less and same. The child had to locate their correct number and initial on the graph. If older, they would have colored in their own bar.

 Then the children combined forces, used teamwork and saw their force doubled.

Science - We discussed how muscles are like rubber bands in that they stretch. To demonstrate, the children used their muscles to pull and release a large rubber band to see how this might work.

To check out just how stretchy a rubber band could be, we experimented. Each child chose a rubber band from our rubber band cache, held it at the end of the ruler and stretched it out.

First we sized the rubber bands to determine who would have which number on the graph, working ordinal count. We graphed the results, again with each child finding their corresponding number on the graph. We discussed the outlier of the big rubber band and how the different sizes of rubber bands compared to their stretchiness on the graph.

Fine Motor - Painting with rubber bands in a variety of ways. I gathered several rubber bands together looped a piece of tape through them and up along the end of a pencil, then secured more tape around the pencil to hold them in place. Mr. G was into the pouncing effect that looked a lot like fireworks. Miss A was into the dragging technique that produced an interesting path of lines across the paper.

Gross Motor - Using an exercise band with ankle/wrist straps that make excellent holding handles, the children learned to use their muscles to work their balance and strength against one another for some tug-o-war. It took them a few minutes to get the coordination down, learn to squat a little for balance, and to use their core muscles more than their arm strength to hold their position or pull back. First one to move forward lost and another child took a turn. They really liked this.

For a simple activity, it was enlightening how much it worked their gross motor skills.

Music/Fingerplay - I couldn't find ANY songs or finger plays for muscles, so I made up my own. You have to pause a little on the last line for THAT and MY to make it smooth.


My Muscles [Farmer in the Dell]
Original song by Little Stars Learning

My muscles help me move
My muscles help me move
I’m so glad that my muscles help me move
 
A muscle pumps my blood
A muscle pumps my blood
I’m so glad that my heart pumps my blood

A muscle lets me talk
A muscle lets me talk
I’m so glad that my tongue lets me talk

Books - We read our big book Head to Toe by Eric Carle and acted out the different movements, using our muscles and discussing which ones we used for each activity. Since this is a common book for us to read, we didn't lose anything by working through the story.

Video - We used this video throughout the Our Body theme. For today, we watched the episode Flexes It's Muscles.

 

It was a really fun learning day. The children were very engaged and picked up many tidbits of information, even ones that I thought would be over their heads.
 Tags: science, body, my, anatomy, physiology, muscles, preschool, daycare, child, care, prek, kindergarten