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The Digestive System
Objectives
To know that food is fuel for the body and has to be digested in order to benefit the body and make it work.
Resources
Lined paper | Banana, orange juice, water, cream crackers, metal tray, plastic cups, paper cup, sealable plastic cups, one leg from a pair of tights, scissors
Today's Lesson
Main Activity
Discuss food as fuel for your bodies. It is important to eat a balanced diet of healthy foods for optimum health. Your body cannot digest every type of food that you might eat and certain foods give your body more fuel than other types.
The following video will provide a good introduction to the different parts of the digestive system.
Look at The Food Pyramid. You will have seen this before; the pyramid shows how much of each food you should eat.
Compare your body to a car. You need to refuel your car with petrol or diesel regularly, otherwise it stops going. Oil needs to be changed or topped up for optimum health of your car. In exactly the same way we need to refuel our bodies with food. The equivalent food to oil would be healthy fruit, protein, vegetables and frequent drinks of water. Not everything we eat can be digested easily by our bodies. If we were to swallow a few kernels of sweet corn whole, they would pass through our bodies undigested and reappear between 12 and 24 hours later when we go to the bathroom. Therefore, our bodies would not get any benefit from eating such things whole, as we cannot extract the nutrients from them. We need to chew our food very well, in order to be able to digest and extract the nutrients from it. You should chew soft foods at least 10 times in your mouth and harder foods more than 30! At your next meal, try to count how many times you chew… not easy!!
Look at the Digestive System PowerPoint to read through with your child. This provides some clear explanations about how the digestive system works.
📊 READ - Digestive System PowerPoint
Have a go at 'recreating' the digestive system with your child with the Digestive System Investigation. This will be a lot of fun and will be a memorable experience for you both, in order to visualise what happens when our body digests food! The instructions give really clear explanations of how to carry out the experiment.