How our stomach works

In the month January, the Kindergarten children talked about the stomach and how it mechanically squishes the food up even more. Teacher introduced the idea of stomach acid that continues to break down and soften the food even more. Here are the pictures of the Kindergarten doing the experiment. 

We discussed about digestive acid in the stomach again, and showed them what happened when we added some vinegar to the green water to make our pretend stomach  acid. The kids were asked to be the stomachs, to mush the crackers up so that our pretend body could digest it. Next up, intestines! We used the stocking and cut off the toe, and used the empty water cup to hold it open, cut the corner off the ziplocks and had the kids helped to squeeze the stomach contents into the intestines. They were showed how the lining of the intestines was permeable- it lets some oozy stuff out which we called it as the nutrients. It was explained that the blood vessels came right up next to the intestines and let the blood pick up food for all the hungry cells. As we squeezed more of the mush through the nylon, more of it came out the sides as nutrients, and the stuff in the middle got smaller. I asked them which was bigger, all the food we eat in a day piled together or the poop we have on the following day, and pointed out that that’s because our body takes in and keeps all the good stuff and pushes the rest out as poop. The grand finale, of course, was when the nylon finally pooped out the leftover green-cracker-mush-pretend-poop. Messy but totally worth it! 

See more at: http://www.altdotlife.com/homeschool-preschool-digestive-system/#sthash.PxnsfOZd.dpuf-