The human body is a fascinating topic for all ages to study, which makes it a perfect choice for a home-schooling family. Even if you have multiple ages to juggle, rest assured you can make studying the human body engaging for EVERYONE!
Unit studies allow you to involve multiple ages and study together, saving time, energy and resources! Win win! Even the youngest of children can participate in some capacity, you can cover the information in as much (or as little) detail as you want.
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What to include:
The human body is made up of 11 systems. Whilst they are all equally interesting, I would actually recommend focusing on just 5 to start with. The top 5 systems I would focus on include:
- Muscular system
- Skeletal system
- Respiratory system
- Cardiovascular system
- Digestive system
These 5 systems give the student a good foundation for understanding the workings of the human body and you can always cover the remaining systems at a later stage.
How to structure each human body system unit:
We followed a similar structure for each system that we studied. Below I’ve outlined what we covered for each body system.
- Function – What role the system plays within the body.
- What the system consists of – The body parts included in each body system.
- Study each component – We used 3 part cards to match pictures to component names and descriptions. With younger children you have the option to just match pictures to their names or discuss their function verbally instead.
- Pathways – Start to finish we learned how each part of the system contributes to the overall function. We then completed a sorting activity to order the events.
- Staying healthy – We studied the things we can do to help keep each system functioning optimally.
- Anatomy – We completed anatomy labelling sheets and colour coded diagrams. Our anatomy sheets are differentiated for younger and older children so pick the option that suits best.
- Copy work – Younger children may have a specific fact to copy, older children may be encouraged to write their own overview.
- Quiz/ review sheet – Either in written form or verbally we checked comprehension by asking questions.
- Hands on activities – These varied from system to system, I’ll touch on the activities we completed below, but all are esimple enough for the whole family to get involved with.
Hands on human body activities:
Our hands on/ STEM activities were a great addition. They helped get our wiggles out and helped illustrate how each system works in a way that makes sense to kiddos. These activities were all super simple and easy to do even with younger siblings in tow! They work so well for all ages!
Musculoskeletal system – For our activity we made a moving hand muscle model using card, twine and pasta tubes. The string acted as the muscle, when you pulled on it, the fingers curl!
Digestive system – We modelled the step by step process of digestion using biscuits! This made a great way to discuss each organ involved the digestive process and provided an opportunity to compare physical vs chemical digestion.
- We mashed the biscuits up with a little water (like our teeth and saliva would).
- Squeezed them (like our oesophagus).
- Added vinegar (to represent stomach acid).
- Then squeezed all the liquid out through a muslin cloth (just like the intestines).
- Finally we chopped a hole in the cloth and plopped the final mixture out (exactly like poop).
Naturally, kids think anything poop related is absolutely brilliant, so this was a huge hit!
Respiratory system – We made a snot model using a toilet roll tube , glitter and a gloopy corn-starch solution to visualise how mucus help trap dust and debris from entering the body. We also took the opportunity to measure our lung capacity too.
Cardiovascular system – For the circulatory system, we measured our heart rates, both when resting and then post exercise, discussing why our heart rate might increase. We also made a simple blood model to get a good idea of the percentages of each component of our blood.
Extras:
No unit study is complete with extra activities to really help bring the topic to life! These really enhanced our unit study and got the children excited to learn more. Here are the extra activities we included throughout our topic.
- Simple muscular and skeletal puzzles with labels – We pieced together the skeleton
- Life size organ cut outs – We lay down and drew an outline around our body then placed the organs and labels in the correct places.
- Organ colouring pages – Every time we finished studying an organ, we coloured in a life-size then glued it to a life size paper body, adding to it as we learned more.
- Body systems flipbook – A simple way to review each body system, we could annotate them with notes and compile our own little booklets.
- Research journals – This journal allowed us to create concise overviews of every system and organ we studied as well as a place to note any new definitions or questions we had.
- Virus attack – Quick and simple, but effective. This printable game helped us to understand the immune system and the defences our bodies employ to keep us healthy.
- Memory matching game – Serving as comprehension for understanding the functions of the major organs of the body as well as a fun brain memory challenge.
The bundle of extras that we used is available here
All of the printables and activities we used (plus much more) are included in my Human Body Systems Unit bundle available below.
The full bundle includes:
- The circulatory system unit
- The muscular system unit
- The skeletal system unit
- The brain and nervous system unit
- The five senses unit
- The digestive system unit
- The respiratory system unit
- Life size organ cut outs
- Muscular and skeletal system puzzles with labels
- Human body organ memory matching game
- Body systems flipbook template
- Virus attack – Immune system game
- The human body research journal
Fun resources to compliment your human body systems unit:
You don’t really need anything in addition to the unit bundle. However, below are some of the ‘nice to haves’ we used. Mainly for the kids to explore independently outside of ‘school’ time.
Dr Livingstons anatomy puzzles – These puzzles are beautifully done, they are medically accurate and actually quite challenging! We have their junior 100 piece full body puzzle which is currently unavailable but they sell several 500 piece anatomy puzzles which would be awesome for older children or as a family project.
Model with removeable organs – Luckily I managed to snag mine from the charity shop but I’ve linked an almost identical model. These were great for little hands to understand the correct placement of the organs within the body and made for a nice tactile fidget toy.
See inside your body book – As with all Usborne lift the flap books, this is incredibly engaging for even little children and as an adult I find there is still always something new to learn. We used this as a bit of a spine alongside the unit!
I hope this post has given you some inspiration to study the human body no matter what age or stage your home-school is currently at. We had so much fun with ours and even as an adult I gained so much from it.