Investigating the digestive system

As the children become more and more fascinated with the body and how things work, I have decided to embrace this and use their curiosity for teaching moments.

After a year of witnessing all my various digestive problems, they have been naturally curious about the digestive system, so I decided to capitalise on this by allowing them to perform an experiment to demonstrate how food is digested.

Ismay of course lectured us on the digestive system and all its functions prior to this!

We got on old pair of tights and cut off one of the legs. This was to represent the large intestine.

We then "fed" in some bread, oats and water.

The children then squeezed really hard all alone the length of our "intestine" replicating the muscles and stomach acid action that is used to break down food.

We found that some stuff came out as seen in the blue bowl representing all the good stuff our body needs to absorb to keep itself healthy.

Of course, all the waste came out the end of the intestine into the white bowl.

Ismay spent many hours moulding said waste material so it more accurately represented poo. Possibly the part of the experiment she enjoyed the most!!