With only a couple weeks left of our summer break, I wanted to get a couple more thematic learning opportunities in at home to break up the monotony of our endless tech saturated days. A couple of very cool interactive books were added to my son’s bookshelf from various birthday and/or Christmas gifts, so we used that as a focus and spent today learning a bit about the human body.

There are so many wonky and amazing facts to learn about how our bodies work that we could easily spend several days on this topic! For example, today we learned that the hair we can visibly see is actually dead and only under the skin is it alive. Besides the weird and gross stuff we found in one of my son’s favorite books, we skimmed through the basics of the muscular, skeletal and digestive systems. As described in one of the books, we timed our resting heart rate and then raced around the living room for one minute before checking our pulses again. Luckily, I have a bizarre double-jointed situation with one of my elbows that enhanced the discussion on our bones and we did a touch of yoga to point out how our muscles are strengthened. Lastly, I’ve been holding on to last month’s Kiwi Co. box because I knew it would go perfectly with this theme and it was a hit!

I would highly recommend checking out this layered book that gives such an amazing view of how the body is put together. It’s very sturdy and loaded with cool information.

In my most recent Usborne book order we received this more advanced Lift-The-Flap book on Biology that I thought would intrigue my son. He was semi-forced to read a handful of facts to us as we finished our lunch, but that’s when we learned that we share 99.9% of our genes with every other human and only the last 0.1% is what makes each of us US.

Our Kiwi Co. box allowed us to make a stethoscope that really works! We also stuffed and laced up cute little felt organs, and using glow-in-the-dark paper with bone stickers, we created an x-ray and huddled in the closet to see it glow. It also came with a really cool life-sized poster. Although we weren’t in love with a couple of the other Kiwi Co. boxes, this one knocked it out of the park!

The last activity that my son really got into was using this Squishy Human Body. His little sister had gotten into this box very quickly after receiving it as a Christmas gift and scattered all the squishy guts around the living room, so this was his first attempt at putting the body back together. Success!

We’re in the process of selling our home and moving soon, so almost all of my Usborne Books are packed up, so we missed a chance to peruse several of the cool human body books that are normally on our shelf. Here’s a direct link to all of UBAM’s human body books.

Now we’re off to check the cat’s heartbeat and then have plans for a rousing family game of Operation that we borrowed from the neighbors! Move that body and drink your water, folks!