Human Body Week (Featuring The Senses): Revisited 1/3-1/7

New year means starting school back up again! I cannot believe we've been off track for so long. I am so ashamed! We started with the human body the last week of November but we were just focused on so many other things I decided we needed to touch base on it again.

We got off to a great start though, talking about the senses, starting with taste:

Tongues, we all have them  and they're muscle-y and can curl into weird shapes and we use them to taste food too, with taste buds! Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and (according to Wikipedia) umami, which is described as a savory and brothy flavor.

First we tasted the food on the plates (salt, sugar, lemon juice, unsweetened cocoa, and bouillon) then I blindfolded Charlotte and found things in the fridge for her to taste and had her tell me what taste it was. After our little tasting session was done we talked about other uses for tongues. 

[I happened to get an iPad for Christmas (which really was a HUGE surprise, all I wanted was some sort of eReader) and found that it came especially handy with school.] 

First we talked about giraffe tongues, why they're blue/black (thought to prevent sunburn!) and why they are so long (18 inches!) we looked at pictures AND THEN I totally brought out the iPad to watch YouTube videos of giraffe tongues.

How awesome is that!!!

We repeated these steps for the other animals we talked about as well, chameleons/frogs, snakes, lions/cats, bats, butterflies/bumblebees. 

Then we talked about sight. We talked about the parts of the eye (I added eyebrows because they really do work to help your eyes), we talked about color blindness and blindness. We talked about seeing color vs black and white (different than color blindness), optical illusions and we talked about night vision. Most of these topics had lead off discussions such as nocturnal animals and night vision. Then we played some "I Spy" games (Char is crazy good at those) and called it a day. I really wanted to show the girls some braille but didn't know how to go about that then I realized I can just show them braille out in public, that will have to wait until the next time we actually go out in public....

We talked about ears and hearing. Char and Lexi have a drum set that they play with every. single. day. Char really REALLY became interested in it after seeing Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.

This is  pretty much the scene in our playroom daily.

Anyway, I was trying to explain that we have little drums in our ears and Char informed me that she already knew that, well EXXXXXXCUUUUSSEEEEEEE ME! We watched a video of a Dr performing a hearing test and then we watched an actual video hearing test with the frequencies and stuff  (I won't lie, I had my fingers crossed for some high pitch freaking out like dogs do...no dice) We talked about how some people are deaf and use their hands to communicate and I downloaded a sign language app which both girls were picking up on so fast it was amazing to watch, now we use basic signs like water, milk, potty, pee pee, Mommy, Daddy, all done and a few others around the house daily because it's just that easy! I decided to test Charlotte's hearing with a game of Marco Polo (sans water of course!) This was her first time playing and it was hilarious because she is a total cheater! She kept peeking over the blindfold, little stinker! Then when it was my turn to say "Marco" she was giggling so much that it was extremely easy to figure out where she was and of course Alexis kept following me around so she wasn't very hard to find either.

Touch didn't happened as planned because I went to the hospital that day to get my pre-surgical admission testing done but, we were just focusing on the senses, this started out as a week about the human body and what better place to learn about the human body than the hospital! Charlotte already knows about bones and muscles and blood etc. Going to the hospital was just really reinforcement on those facts, I wish she would have gone back to the lab with me when I had blood drawn but she didn't, oh well, she has seen me have blood drawn before...

Smell didn't quite happen as planned either. We DID smell some stuff that day but didn't really get into specifics. We did happen to talk about how the nostrils lead back into your throat so in theory you could eat through your nose...and we played with the Clementine modeling dough that day and that stuff smelled amazing, but senses are something we use everyday so a couple of senses we didn't get specific with doesn't phase me one bit.

This picture has nothing to do with senses but I thought it was so funny I had to post it.

Next week is the letter I...insects!