Digestion in Year 4
Year 4 have been finding out what happens to their food when they eat.
What happens to food when we eat it? This is the question that the scientists of Year 4 have been trying to answer this term.
Starting with a bowl of breakfast, we created a model of the human digestive system. First, the food was cut and mashed by the teeth in the mouth. Saliva was added to help the chewed food slide down the oesophagus into the stomach. Here we added enzymes and contracted our model stomach to digest our food. Following this process, a pair of tights was the perfect tool for demonstrating what happens to the food in the small intestine. Removing all the excess water with a tea-towel helped to show the process in the large intestine and we were left with a final job of removing the waste products from our ‘body’.
This was fantastic practical science which was then followed up by learning the names, functions and locations of the organs of the human digestive system using a variety of models, books and diagrams.
