Lessons · Teaching · body systems and personal health at this age
Body systems and personal health at this age
The systems a primary curriculum covers are skeletal, muscular, circulatory, respiratory, digestive and nervous, at the level of what each is for and how they work together. Personal health covers sleep, hygiene, dental care, sun safety and the reasons behind each.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
In beta. This lesson was written for Hone and has not yet been checked by a state certification officer. Practice material, not professional advice. What that means.
What it is for
Children are interested in their own bodies and will ask precise questions. Knowing what each system does, and the honest limit of what you know, is what keeps the lesson accurate. This also overlaps the science road, and the overlap is genuine rather than a repetition.
How to think about it
Teach each system by its job and its main parts, then by one connection to another system. The connections are what makes it a body rather than six diagrams: the circulatory system carries what the respiratory system collected, the muscular system pulls on the skeletal one.
Worked example
The skeleton supports, protects and allows movement, and muscles pull rather than pushA muscle can only shorten, which is why they come in pairs that work against each other.
The heart pumps blood, the lungs exchange gases, and the two systems are one delivery serviceOxygen collected in one place is delivered by the other. That connection is the lesson.
Sleep need at primary age is around nine to eleven hours, and tiredness shows as behaviourUseful to know and useful to say to families, without diagnosing anything.
Sun safety and dental care are taught as habits with reasons, not as rulesA reason survives the holidays. A rule lasts as long as the person enforcing it.
Your turn
Name the only thing a muscle can do.
A muscle can but not push
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Answering a medical question. Children will ask about illnesses, sometimes their own or a relative's. The professional answer explains the system honestly and refers anything about a specific person to a family and a doctor.
Now you try
Next in Teaching
- Safety, first aid, and what the school actually requires of yousafety, first aid and what a school actually requires
- Mental, emotional and social health in a primary roommental, emotional and social health in a primary classroom
- The order children actually acquire movement inmotor skills, and the order children acquire them in