Tuesday 4 September 2012

At the heart of science

Since Littletree’s recent foray into dissecting brains was such a success, we decided to get to the heart of the matter, and dissect some hearts.

***again: graphic pics warning, don’t scroll down if you’re squeamish, instead, peruse this old post which includes a very cute picture of Littletree***

So back to the butcher for lamb’s hearts, and out with the science lab equipment!

P1080891

Littletree was really excited to see all the different chambers in the heart, and how the bigger blood vessels feed in and out of the chambers. We learned about how the valves work and how the muscle pumps.

P1080893

We got out some medical books and learned about the heart in humans and various genetic disorders, and the whole circulatory system.

And as always, Littletree got out her microscope and made up some slides to look at heart tissue.

P1080895

Apparently I now need to source bovine eyeballs for dissection. I swear this wasn’t in the brochure when I signed up for parenting.

3 comments:

  1. Always love to hear about your experiments! I know an expert in the field of early child education and we had a great chat the other day about the matter and she made a comment about unschooling being rubbish and I told her about you and S and microbiology and her already knowing everything in the science class for way older kids. She was impressed :) Hugs to you!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. that's cool Jenn :) But she's probably right - unschooling is rubbish and children will never learn anything... I'm sure that's going to kick in any day now and my child will magically turn into a completely illiterate zombie.
      :-P

      Delete
  2. Wow!!! She has grown so much! Lovely to see her love of learning!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your lovely words, witty banter and entertaining discussion :)