Digestive Stuff - Part 2

Our second lab of the Digestive unit showed the length of a child's digestive tract -- 21 feet!  We had a piece of yarn 21' long, then stapled index cards labeled with the distance along the tract.  We labeled the mouth at 3" from the beginning, the esophagus 10" from the mouth, the stomach 6" from the esophagus, the small intestine 15' from the stomach, and finally the large intestine 4' from the small intestine.  We spread it out from one end of the room to the other... actually, the digestive tract was longer than the length of the room and we had to coil the small intestine a bit to make it all fit.  This activity really showed Madeline the true length and she was amazed that her digestive tract was so long and coiled up inside her little body.  I tried to get a photo of the entire thing, but it was near impossible.  Here is the beginning of the digestive tract, just to show you what I mean.  Super simple, yet very effective. 

Last summer, we found this cool anatomy apron while perusing garage sales. I just love going to yard sales of home schoolers and teachers! The organs are held on with velcro and the kidneys are on the backside.  Madeline likes to play with this every now and again, but was even more excited now that we were discussing some of these organs.

We finished off the digestive unit with a snack and Madeline proudly exclaimed that her trail mix will be in her stomach for the next 3 hours getting squeezed and mashed up into a liquid form!