Lungs, Hearts, and muscles

 it has been an incredible month for science!

I have a friend whose dad is a butcher, and he's been so good to me in the past, and he got me the tongue, esophagus/trachea, lungs and heart (all still connected) of a cow! Seriously, it was awesome!

When I got it, I was a bit worried. It was in this bloody see through garbage bag, and it just seemed pretty gruesome, but I was undaunted, and brought it to school.

We learned quite a bit about lungs from doing experiments that didn't include the cow lungs, including proving that our air is mostly carbon dioxide when it comes out by putting out a candle, showing them a homemade lung model, and how much air your lungs can hold by blowing into a jar filled with water. 

And then came out the lungs (that was still connected to the heart and tubes) it was so big when straightened out, it took up most of the sled I brought to contain it!

We watched this awesome youtube video to help us dissect it:

I think my favourite moment was when Heather Burton came in and the look on her face was not of disgust, but of absolute love of learning. She wanted to know everything. 

I certainly learned a lot. It's one of my favourite dissections I've ever done. I was amazed at how easy it was to see the different air and blood pipes and how those pipes became smaller and smaller until they interchanged oxygen with one another. Also, I didn't realize that your trachea is made up of cartilage hoops all the way, to make sure your air passageways stay open.

Then the next science class we did was about the heart. I had prepared hearts to dissect, but then I had the heart that was connected to the lungs that I kept. HOLY COW there was a huge difference (get it? Holy cow?-moving on.)

We used "We the Curious" Youtube again, and we saw the heart strings, the different chambers and everything.

The red one I'm holding is the fresh specimen, and the brownish grey one is the prepared. It was so hard and smelly. It makes me only want to use fresh specimens ever. It's a whole lot cheaper too! (Free from my friend!)

We had so many activities to do about the circulatory system, that each club (I have a younger and an older) didn't get to all of them. I had these "blood type" tests, and I had never used them before, and so I thought you just pricked yourself and then sent it in to get tested, so I thought that wasn't interesting enough for the Youngers, so I waited until the older came, but then I realized that you could find out your blood type IMMEDIATELY! Cool? Yes.

I only had five tests (one for each of my kids) but I decided that I would do it with anyone willing to get impaled by me. (I'm glad that their parents are my friends because I forgot to ask permission!) and it was so cool to see how the blood reacted differently with the different chemicals on the paper. 

The three non-McKays were all O+ and the McKays were all A-, and I'm so grateful that we had at least two different kinds! We looked at their blood under the microscope. It isn't red under the microscope, it's clear!

And this week we learned about muscles. I wasn't prepared as much as I should have been. I had them watch a few extra Brainpops this week while I finished up my tendon-hands. But they were worth it, they were pretty fun:

 You can't tell in this photo because for the older I ran out of coloured string and used fishing line instead, but there's tendons running down every finger. The rest of them were better than this one, but I forgot to take a photo during science club.

We also did a few activities to feel and be aware of our own muscles.

Yep! Pretty cool science month.