my heart is like a zoo

Our book for the Valentine Week was My Heart is Like a Zoo. For the literature, we read the book and went on a heart hunt through the story. Then we went on a classroom heart hunt and graphed our hearts.

 

The hearts we found became our zoo animals. We used gluesticks and markers to create our animals.
 Throughout the week, the children used their eyes to seek out hearts of all shapes and sizes. When we talk about our senses I use words and phrases such as visual clues, auditory clues, sense of smell, sense of touch, etc. I have been doing this since the very beginning of the school year and just now the children are starting to tell me about their clues.  When we read a story and the children tell me what is going to happen next as they look at the illustrations. I will tell them that they are using their eyes to seek out visual clues to the story. I use descriptive phrases like this to illustrate and reinforce each child's actions and processes. Rather than say great job or a simple yes, I prefer to reinforce what they are telling me by repeating what they said with the physical action of how they came to that conclusion. Let's just say I jump into it kinesthetically. I like to make connections and build autonomy this way. I believe it gives them more power an control over their own learning, to know that they are physically capable of using their body as a tool for learning.

We also learned about how our heart works. We used our fists to demonstrate the size and pumping actions of our hearts. We tested our resting hear rate and our accelerated heart rate. We dance around our room to build our heart up and later throughout the week, when the children had been running or bike riding, they would run to me to feel their hearts beating. I would feel their heart beats and say the thumpy, thumps out loud with them repeating after me. Of course we used a stethoscope to listen to our heartbeats and we looked at pictures of the muscles in our bodies. I really liked this book (darn it is out of print but I think this is the same one?) and this book. Also, just found a hand pump at the hardware store used for siphoning gas that will be a great tool to demonstrate the in and out pumping of our blood through our hearts.