Muscles

Using details from text about muscles to create a T chart of things your body does voluntarily and things it does on its own without thinking about it.

What if we could not bend or lift our arms or our legs? Try performing your regular tasks during an hour without bending these limbs. Write a paragraph telling how moving muscles is important to our daily functions.

Research a set of muscles. Write a paper explaining what you found out regarding the science of those muscles.

Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the first artists to draw the human muscular system and skeletal system in detail. Visit this site to see some of his early drawings. Discuss: Why were his sketches important to science and art?

Hold an object out at arm's length — a book or a basketball. Time the period of time that a person can hold the object before they feel the need to put it down. Take a 5 minute rest and repeat. Chart the time difference between the two endurance measures. Compare different people. Compare different ages. What can you hypothesize about your results? Represent the problem on a one or more scaled bar graphs. 

Head to the Guinness World Records site for human records — tallest, shortest, fastest, you name it. Create contextual math problems to meet any standards you need to practice. Here is a spreadsheet of all of the London 2012 Olympics records set. Create some contextual problems from these facts.

Pushes and pulls can have different strengths and directions. A bigger push or pull makes things speed up or slow down more quickly. Examples of pushes or pulls could include a person pushing an object.

All organisms have body parts. Different animals use their body parts in different ways. Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to grasp objects, protect themselves, and move from place to place.

Emphasis is on systems of information transfer.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics.

The energy released from food was once energy from the sun that was captured by plants. Food provides animals with the materials they need for body repair and growth and the energy they need to maintain body warmth and for motion.

Emphasis is on inferring general patterns of relatedness among structures or different organisms by comparing the appearance of anatomical structures or organs in diagrams or pictures.

Within individual organisms, food moves through a series of chemical reactions in which it is broken down and rearranged to form new molecules, to support growth, or to release energy.

In multicellular organisms, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues. Tissues form organs that are specialized for particular body functions. Examples could include the interaction of subsystems within a system and the normal functioning of those systems.