Science Education Idea Exchange

We wanted to make the human body more interactive and more STEM based. I think all of us have seen the lung bottle made out of a water bottle, balloon, and straw, right? Rather than presenting the model to the students and have them identify the parts, I decided to challenge my students to building a working lung model. The problem they were provided was to inflate a balloon inside of a bottle without touching the balloon directly. We spent a little time planning after they had read about the respiratory system. I gave them two days for construction. The first day, many students were trying to simply place a balloon in the bottle, attached to a straw. They thought it would be as simple as blowing in the straw. Boy, were they surprised! I encouraged my students to think about how their bodies work, hoping they would think of the diaphragm. The picture below were the top contenders from each class. It was so cool to see their creativity and to help them conceptualize the respiratory ...

My husband and I love playing the game from the App store called "Stack the Countries".  Since my seventh graders are getting ready to start the human body. My unit is severely lacking, so I decided to create an adaptation of "Stack the Countries" called "Stack the Organs".  Students will answer questions about the organs such as: What organ system does it belong to? What does it do? What organs is it near? or Where in the body is it located? When students successfully answer the question, they earn the organ and have to stack them so they reach a certain point.  If I had a magnetic whiteboard, I would adhere magnets to the back of my organs and draw a line on the whiteboard for the students to try to pass.  The organs must be touching for it to count. I cut most of the organs out using templates I printed off from this  website .  It was hard to find all of the organs I wanted to scale, so I did the best that I could with the missing o...