The beginning of the week got off to a very interesting start! On Monday, Anna visited to faciliate a dissection of a brook trout! While we started off a bit hesitant, our cusiousity got the better of us and we could not contain our interest!  Our main objective was to see the anatomy and organs and to compare and contrast the similarities between human bodies and trout.

This week was all about how we keep our bodies healthy. Starting with our external body, we learned about our skin and how we take care of it. Through a fun, hands-on experiment using paper, sunscreen, and the sun, we saw how sunscreen protects our skin from the effects of UV light. Transitioning to how we take care of the inside of our bodies, we exercised our brain using fun Brain Gym activities. These are a series of 26 kinesthetic activities that are used to increase focus and concentration, engagement, and memory. We were surprised to learn that even our brains need exercise, too!  Finally, we started a discussion on diet and food as fuel for our bodies. We had many questions around this topic, but most importantly we were able to create a Driving Question for our Human Body project! Our Human Body Project Driving Question is:

"How can we as health experts help the students and teachers at TVCS eat healthy?"

We are very excited to see where this question leads us and we had a great brainstorming session on how we can help our school eat healthier and have happier lives! Stay tuned for more updates as we dive into this question...

We are so excited to have developed a new twist in our human body study, and be answering some crucial and secondary answers to our newly created main driving question. How can we as health experts help students at TVCS eat healthier?  In efforts to learn more about those "healthy" details, we sure had a fun and interactive time by brainstorming what are healthy foods to put into our bodies and what it does for us. Our list included:

Strawberries

Milk

Meat

Nuts

Banana Chips

Zucchini

Broccoli

Pomegranate Juice

The list kept going!

We chatted that we covered the main important food groups of fruits, vegetables, proteins, dairy AND sweets, which don't do our bodies much good, but are a tasty treat every now and again. 

So... we juiced! We cut veggies, fruits, citrus and juiced them and drank them! What a fun experience. On Tuesday, we continued with food groups and spent much of project time sorting foods into their certain categories, and learned about the "food  plate" (this now has replaced the old and confusing food pyramid.) This new method is a very clear illustration to kids about what we need to eat at EVERY meal.