This week we continued to add to our body map. We talked about the heart at the beginning of the week. The kids took away a vary important fact: if you have no heart, you are not alive. True Fact!  We had conversations about basic parts of the heart, and basic fucntions. A lot made sense to us. We now know why we breathe so hard when we run, and what it means when someone says, " my heart was pounding so hard, I thought it was going to explode!" Later in the week we learned about our respiratory system. We saw a cool demonstration of a balloon in a plastic water bottle and how it can act like our lungs do. Then, we had a competition to see who had the stronget lungs! We timed one another blowing bubbles into a bowl of water using a straw. It was so much fun and we got to compare numbers to see who had the longest time.

On Wednesday, we headed to the Teton Vision Clinic to review our knowledge of the eye and get a hands-on expericence of tools eye doctors use, and what they do to help eyes that aren't perfect. 

Anna paid us a surprise visit on Wednesday during lunch time, to show us the special food that our fry are ready to eat. Once we sprinkled it over the surface of the water and observed, we realized that that theses young fish still have a tiny food supply in their sac, and they don't need to eat quite yet. We will try again in a few days!

For our Human Body project, we spent this week investigating the digestive system. We first decided as a class that we should make a personal, life-sized "body map", so that as we learn more and more about our body systems and organs, we can map the different parts on cut outs of our own bodies! Thursday was spent with partners, measuring how tall we are so that we know how big we needed our paper body cut out to be. Then, we practiced our fine motor skills tracing one another and adding faces to our body maps. On Friday, we were able to put our stomachs and intestines on our body maps after we did a cool experiment "digesting" saltines in a bag!

We did a lot of guided discovery in such a shortened week. We have a few different projects all going on simultaneously.  On Monday, we visited Dan Streubel at his physical therapy office in Driggs. We learned that muscles come in pairs, ligaments help attach muscle to bone, and that we have over 600 muscles in our body. We also had MaryBeth Cox, a graudate student from TSS spend her week in here. She spent the week teaching very hands-on and exploratory lessons helping us gain familiarity with how animals' bodies adapt to thier environment, and how human bodies adapt as well. She had great energy, ideas and fun experiments for us during the week. We learned a lot about animal adaptations in winter, elaborated on our previous knowledge of our five senses, and used the steps in the science circle (an updated version of the scientific method we all remember.)

Lastly, our Trout in the Classroom continues to change daily as we make observation of changes, and the different phase stages. Early in the week, the students made note of "wiggling tails" - Kaycee and that they are "swimming with a little yolk sac left" - Abby

This week during Projects, we continued our study of the human body by learning about our muscular system. We read many books that talked about our muscles and how they help us move and explored our muscles through muscle identification and movement games. On Thursday, we were able to stretch and build our muscles during a field trip to Yoga on Little in Driggs. Deb Payne, a certified yoga instructor, talked to us about taking good care of our muscles through strength training and stretching. We also learned that sometimes we want to move our muscles, but sometimes our muscles and bodies need rest. At the end of our yoga practice we were rejuvenated and all ready to take a nap!