Curious Kitties: My Body’s a Pretty Cool Thing

Bi-monthly I present a super-fantastic science and math storytime called Curious Kitties for ages 2-5. I provide two unusual times so families that cannot make our typical storytimes have a chance to come to a program. There is one on Thursday night and one on Friday morning. You know when you do a program for the second time and it is infinitely better than the first one? Yup, guilty as charged for this one. I should definitely start doing dress rehearsals.

This month, we studied our body and all the cool scientific facts and mathematical tools to examine it. What’s not to love about the mass of gooey substances that are held together by a hairy elastic coating? Our bodies are so cool that they can do this:

Or we can try to do this:

Our bodies are capable of so many things! For this Curious Kitties, we looked at separate parts of our body and measuring and comparing our body to other things.

Storytime (20-25 minutes)

1. Opening Song: Shake Your Sillies Out

2. Importance of scientific observation addressed to parents—A great tool to use when doing science and math with young kids is a more simplified version of the Scientific Process: make predictions, test, discuss. You will be able to use this later during our lab portion of the program so remember those three simple steps: make predictions, test, discuss.

3. Book: What is a healthy body? Let’s see with Healthy Kids by Maya Ajimera

4. Flannel: Bippity Boppity Boo

5. Book: We have now looked at our healthy body and we’ve identified certain parts of our body. Now let’s look at the size of our body compared to other animals. Let’s see how big some of these animals really are. Life-Size Farm by Teruyuki Komiya

6. Activity: Those were some big animals–and some just our size! Adults, help me measure the children with crepe paper and then we will tape them to the wall to see where the measure up.

7. Activity Rhyme: Head Shoulders Knees and Toes (do 3 times, getting faster and faster)

8. Flannel: Brain Stomach Lungs and Heart – organ template at Make Learning Fun,

Brain Stomach Lungs and Heart

Lungs and Heart

Brain Stomach Lungs and Heart

Lungs and Heart

Eyes and ears and mouth and nose

Brain Stomach Lungs and Heart

Lungs and Heart

9. Warm-Up for Lab: Identify what body parts we will be studying (heart, lungs, stomach) then clap out big, scientific words on posters around the room. These included: circulation, respiration, and digestion. We clap out words by doing it normally, then loudly, then softly.

Lab Time: I got my inspiration for this whole Curious Kitties through The Show Me Librarian (which my fingers always mistype as The Shoe Me Librarian, which is a much, much better name, Amy). I LOVED her activities. They were so simple yet have so much opportunity for conversation and scientific observation.

There were a few new tactics that I wanted to take to encourage scientific conversation and using the scientific method. I decided to add posters of a few vocabulary words that did not overwhelm with information and I added a large picture of the featured organ. Books were also available to provide parents with talking points. I also wanted to encourage a more fulfilling experience with these activities that could potentially be zipped through without any conversation. At ALA, I went to a presentation that included the Vice President of RIF, Reading Is Fundamental, Judy B. Cheatham. I gave her my contact information and was sent about 40 free books dealing with STEAM! How cool is that! So, after the kids completed 2 worksheets (one for the stomach and one for the heart), they were given a free book to take home forever. I know this is not always a possibility with smaller budgets but giving away books just became easier! Scholastic offers a program called FACE that includes a discount of 43%-80% off of books that are being GIVEN AWAY. Pretty cool, huh?

Speaking of the worksheets, one question on The Heart worksheet asked what sound the heart makes. Results include: thump, bump bump bump (2), dump, pump, whoosh whoosh, beepity bumpity, and boom boom. Such a wide assortment!

Without much further ado, here are the stations and my resulting pictures:

Station 1: Our Beating Heart

Supplies: Toilet Paper tubes, worksheet

Station 2: Our Digesting Stomach

Supplies: Activity sheet, ziploc bag, duct tape, pudding, saltines, cereal

Station 3: Our Breathing Lungs

Supplies: Paper Bags (I only laid out a few but a friendly volunteer suggested that I have one for each child, due to rampant and the unrelenting spread of sickness)