The Heart
Valentine’s Day will soon be here. As you can imagine, the children have been doing lots of activities with heart shapes in preparation for that wonderful day dedicated to love and friendship.
Today, the children learned about the real heart and how it works tirelessly inside the body. Here a few of the points we touched on:
- All animals, reptiles, birds and fish have a heart.
- The heart is a large muscular organ.
- Its function is to pump blood.
- The blood carries food and oxygen to other muscles and organs in the body.
- The heart never stops pumping while a person is alive.
- It is pumping blood around the body even when a person is asleep.
- When an animal such as a turtle or a woodchuck hibernates in winter, its heart beats very, very slowly.
During free choice time in the classroom, the children had an opportunity to play with a device that I made that worked sort of like a heart. Two latex free gloves were connected to one another by way of a length of clear plastic tubing. One glove was filled with warm red water (the blood) infused with gold sparkles (the food and oxygen). Each child had opportunities to pump the blood from one glove to the other by squeezing the glove that was full. The child could watch the blood suffused with sparkles travel through the tubing from one glove to the other.
The children also had an opportunity to listen to baby Socrates’ heart beating by using a stethoscope (very fast). They also listened to their own hearts working.
First, a child heard his/her heart pump relatively slowly while the child was at rest and then more quickly after the child had jumped for a while on the jumping board.
Finally, we learned that the heart is such an important muscle in our bodies that we often imagine that it is where our most intense feelings are kept.
Happiness….
“My heart jumped for joy”
Sadness….
“My heart is broken”
And, best of all…
“I love you with all my heart.”
I hope this experience inspires more discussions about the heart and its important role in our bodies as you sit around the dinner table tonight.
Nannie Brown