Human Body Science for K-2 Grades

I made you look with this title, didn’t I? I bet it will be one of those top 10 posts of the year in the end of the year. Seriously though, I decided to follow my kindergartener’s interests this year as far as science is concerned. Of course, she loves those spectacular vinegar+baking soda types of experiments, but she also loves to learn more about human body. So we are slowly going through Usborne First Encyclopedia of the Human Body. The best thing that I love about the book is the collection of Internet links, which became one of my favorite resources. You can access Usborne Quick Links resources for this book here even if you don’t have the book itself – just change the page number in the form to see what else available. Anna enjoyed the game to put back human organs together, and I could appreciate how much she already knows about various systems in it. She also labeled some of them for her future human body book.

We started learning somewhat more advanced stuff about our sense of sight by following Usborne links. Anna was interested to learn more about vision problems even though the mechanics (or, rather, optics) of it is, of course, beyond her grasp. The fun part was games involving a blindfold. We were calling this particular game of catching people by sound “a blind cat” when I was growing up. Anna turned out to be an amazingly good cat, which made me wonder if her sense of hearing and touch is sharper than mine and not dulled out by 40+ years of relying mostly on sight.

We’re having a lot of fun with this science “cirriculum” that follows my daughter’s interests more than any other “official” curriculum I’ve seen up to date. I am thinking we’ll be sticking with it more or less for the whole year, since this is a long book. Our next topic is hearing and sound, and I already have a lot of ideas there.