We're working on ways to find information, take the relevant parts and use it to answer our questions. Today we read a chapetr about skin in order to answer the following question: What is our skin's job?

Look out for the answers written up in 4S students' own words...

We're working on ways to find information, take the relevant parts and use it to answer our questions. Today we read a chapetr about skin in order to answer the following question: What is our skin's job?

Look out for the answers written up in 4S students' own words...

Inquiry Questions

The kids have been thinking about the ways that their bodies work. We tend to take our bodies for granted... simple things like breathing, moving our fingers, blinking, hearing, they just seem to happen! But what makes them happen? What are they connected to? Why do they happen? Why are they important?

Here are the students' inquiry questions:

Why do our feet get tired when we run?
Why does our skin stretch while talking?
Why do we blink our eyes?
How does our body help us to move our fingers?
How do we know how hard, soft or bumpy something is when we feel it?
What happens to our brain when we study?
How do our ear drums work?
How do we dream?
What happens to our skin when we get older?
Why do we lose our skin?
Why do we feel fresh after sleep?
Is your sense related to feelings and why?
Why does our heart beat fast when we run?
When we're sprinting, why does our heart beat faster?
How does our body help us to move our legs to walk?
What happens to our bones when we bend our body?
Why is our heart so important?
Where does the air go when we breathe in, and how does it help our body?
Does our spinal cord help us to sit?

Turning our work on choices into an inquiry into the real effects of our choices on our bodies

We thought about all the choices we make every day or every week of our lives, wrote them on pieces of scrap paper and then stuck them up all over the room - the walls are a mess! It made it really easy for us to start thinking about how our bodies are affected by those choices.

Yoga with Mrs. Fairbairn

To find out more about how certain activities affect our bodies, we did some yoga with a secondary teacher called Mrs. Fairbairn. Can you find out more information about yoga? Can you learn any new stances?

Choices, choices, choices...

The second teacher question in this Unit of Inquiry is "how is our body affected by our choices?". We have started our exploration of this question by thinking about the choices we make every day and deciding whether we think they are good or bad for our bodies. Here are some examples:

"I have made a choice to drink less coffee at work, and I hope that it will be good for my health." Mr. Sherratt

I make a choice to sleep only 5 hours,and that is bad for my health.
Henrica

My good choice is to sleep daily 8 hours
Afsana

My choice is to sleep at 8:30 thats good for me because I can get lots of rest
Farzad

My choice is to do my homework everyday i think thats good for my brain.
Afif

My choice is that I will drink milk and eat egg every single night and and morning.
Mysha

My choice is to play basketball everyday and I think its a good choice.
Meem

Experts teach their peers

The experts on each of the body's systems spent several hours working together in small groups gathering information, preparing lesson ideas and materials and doing role-play lessons.

Today, they went back to their original table groups and taught each other about the systems our bodies are composed of. Here are some pictures, read the comments section to see how they thought it went.

Locating and Referencing Relevant Texts (what?????)

During this Unit of Inquiry, 4S will be learning how to show where they have got their information from. We will start doing this when they are finding information for the "jig-sawing" project in which they are learning about the main body systems. First, they will get in their expert groups and select books, chapters and chunks of text that they believe will help them in their project. They will then write the name of the book, the author, the date of publishing, the publisher and the relevant pages in their Unit of Inquiry books.

We have already found out that the Skeletal System is one of the systems in our bodies. Now, We're going to do some "jig-sawing" in order to learn what some of the other body systems are. In "jig-sawing" you teach other. To do this, you have been put into "expert goups' who will use the Internet and the books in our classroom to find out about one particular body system. You will then go back to your table group to teach them what you learned about.

Here are the expert groups:

Muscular System - Zahin, Verkha, Henrica, Meem
Skeletal System - Rushmila, Rhythma, Afsana, Ashfaq
Respiratory System - Armaan, Mahabubul, Afif, Moin
Nervous System - Rikitta, Yaman, Zaima, Mysha
Digestive System - Rawan, Saqlain, Lubana
Circulatory System - Zahra, Farzad, Farshed, Sohel

This is what you will need to research:

1. Explain what your body system does for us.
2. Name the parts of the system.
3. Draw a diagram of the system.
4. Draw a chart or diagram to explain how the system works.

Here's a good website to get you started, click on the name of your system when you hover the mouse over the bodies:

http://users.tpg.com.au/users/amcgann/body/