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You are here: Home / science / anatomy / Human Body: Learning About Muscles

Human Body: Learning About Muscles

September 25, 2011 by Maureen Spell 9 Comments

We’re moving right along learning all about our body. This week we studied muscles. Isn’t it amazing all we can do just because we have muscles? We learned that we have over 600 muscles, that there are smooth muscles, cardiac muscles, and skeletal muscles.

biceps

We did a lot of movement and hands-on activities for this muscle lesson:

1. Each child had a partner. One was the look-out and the other had to try to tell all the muscles in his/her body not to move for 30 seconds. The look-out watched to see if that person could do it.

Teaching: Obviously we can’t tell all our muscles that they can’t move! The kids learned that they blinked, breathed, swallowed etc. all during that 30 sec. time-frame. I used this activity to illustrate the difference between voluntary and involuntary muscles.

2. We played a group game of line-tag. Since we meet in a gym, this was a fun game to get some wiggles out and illustrate the point that we need to use our muscles to keep them strong. With line-tag, kids can only run on the lines that are on the gym floor. Once they are tagged, they are out (or you can make them it and have multiple students who are it). I like this version of tag because it makes the kids think and strategize while playing.

bicepcraft

3. Each child placed their hand on their bicep. They slowly lowered their arm to feel the muscle relax. Then they placed their hand on their triceps while their arm was lowered. They could feel their triceps contract.

Teaching: We learned that many skeletal muscles work together in pairs. While one muscle contracts, the other relaxes.

After observing their own muscles, we made a model of how muscles contract to pull the bones up. I printed this arm out from Scholastic’s Human Body: Easy Make and Learn Projects.

humanbodybook

musclecoloring

We went over some muscle examples in the My First Human Body coloring book.

muscleexperiment
Next it was time to observe some real muscles in the form of meat. Some of the children were surprised to find out that the meat was a muscle.

muscleexperiment2
The kids pulled apart the meat to see the muscle fibers. This was a Try This! experiment from the Apologia Anatomy book.

Another busy, yet fun anatomy class!

Downloads:
Muscles Take-Home Sheet

To see what we’ve done so far click the image below:

humanbody

Linking up to:

Science Sunday

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Filed Under: anatomy, science Tagged With: anatomy

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Comments

  1. JDaniel4's Mom says

    September 25, 2011 at 12:34 pm

    The tag game sounds like a lot of fun! I love the way you showed the meat as a muscle. What a great tie in.

    Reply
  2. Mary says

    September 25, 2011 at 2:55 pm

    I just bought that book for $1 from Scholastic. Can't wait to use it!

    Reply
    • lisa englert says

      July 8, 2014 at 1:01 am

      i could not find the book on scholastic website – what did you look under

      Reply
      • Maureen Spell says

        July 8, 2014 at 10:35 am

        Here’s the link: http://shop.scholastic.com/shop/ProductDisplayView?storeId=10751&productId=163302&urlRequestType=Base&langId=-1&catalogId=10051

        Reply
  3. Ticia says

    September 26, 2011 at 7:01 pm

    my kids think it's the coolest thing in the world to explore the dead chicken before we cook it and look at the muscles.

    Reply
  4. Liberty says

    September 27, 2011 at 10:50 am

    Enjoyed your post. We are doing a unit on the body later this year… these are great ideas. I think we have the same Scholastic book too. Visiting from Science Sunday 🙂 Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
  5. Low T says

    August 23, 2013 at 10:30 am

    Thanks for finally writing about >Human Body: Learning About Muscles – Spell Out Loud <Loved it!

    Reply
  6. Allicia says

    April 5, 2017 at 6:02 pm

    Where can I find the printable of the arm with the brads in it to make it move?

    Reply
    • Maureen Spell says

      April 6, 2017 at 3:59 pm

      https://shop.scholastic.com/teachers-ecommerce/books/easy-make-learn-projects-human-body-9780545406437.html

      Reply

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