Digestive stuff

Today Maddie told me that she'd like to do more science stuff, so more science stuff we'll do.  We're still working on the human body and the focus at the moment is the digestive system.  We read a couple books from the library and did the experiments that were in the books.

Since digestion begins in the mouth as you break up food with your teeth, our first experiment involved chewing food and spitting it out to examine it.  Madeline first chewed a bite of carrot 10 times, then spit it out.  The next piece of carrot was chewed up around 30 times... it was hard to count since she was giggling so much.  Lovely photo though, no?  Even though this was supposed to show that the longer you chew food, the smaller the pieces will be,  we didn't really notice a whole big difference.  Could be that the first carrot stick was cut in half and the next was a whole one.  Who knows.


The next thing we did was collect little bits of food that could typically be eaten for lunch or as a snack.  We grabbed the leftover crust from a pb+honey sandwich, some noodles from last nights dinner, a piece of watermelon, cantaloupe, and two cherry tomatoes. We also needed a little bit of milk to wash it all down.  Madeline added all of the ingredients into a ziploc bag and then squeezed it all together to symbolize the stomach mashing up food to turn it into a liquid mixture.  She really liked this and also thought it was a little bit gross.

Here she is adding the ingredients:

..... and mashing it all up.

These are the books we read.  I really like the Paul Showers books and we usually end up doing the experiments that they suggest.

Tomorrow we will add some digestive materials to our skeleton and do the labs included in RSO.