Eis 22: the human body

Activity 1: Exercise, Homeostasis, and Change

In this lesson, you learned the general idea of what the body is doing all the time and what it’s made of. The body is always hard at work either trying to stay the same—maintain homeostasis—or change. These are really important big-picture ideas! We’ll have a lot more time to get into the specifics of some ways that your body maintains homeostasis and changes, either temporarily or permanently. For now, let’s look at one great example of both temporary change and maintaining homeostasis: Exercise!

materials

None, unless you prefer to exercise with equipment.
​Thermometer (recommended, but not required)

activity

1. Take some pre-exercise vital signs:
  • Measure your pulse. You can either find a radial pulse or a carotid pulse, or, if you have a smartwatch, you can use the pulse on there. If you’ve never done this before, a carotid (neck) pulse is easiest to check. This video will walk you through it. Be sure to measure: Count the number of times you feel a beat in 30 seconds and then double it to get the beats per minute. Normal is between about 60 and about 100.
  • Assess your breathing rate. Count how many times you breathe in 30 seconds and then double it to get your breaths per minute. It’s easiest to have someone else do this when you’re not aware, because we tend to change our breathing patterns when we’re thinking about it. Normal is between about 12 and about 20.
  • If you have a thermometer, check your temperature. With or without a thermometer, you can also make note of some other subjective measures of body temperature and our body’s response to changing temperature, such as whether your hands and feet feel cold, whether your face appears red and flushed, whether you’re sweating, and so on.
2. Exercise! 5-10 minutes should do the trick, but you should also see some effects after even just 1 or 2 minutes. Anything that gets your heart rate up and makes you feel like you’re working hard is great, such as running, playing active games, dancing vigorously, doing jumping jacks, doing pushups, and so on.
3. Immediately after exercise, check your vital signs again. Make some subjective notes about how you’re feeling now. How has your body changed in response to the demands of your activity?
4. Sit down and relax for 5-10 minutes. You can even try meditating or taking some deep breaths to go full-swing in the opposite direction.
5. Take your vital signs again. How are you feeling now? How has your body maintained homeostasis despite the recent change from exercise?

If you’re having fun, we want to see it! If you have an Instagram and the permission of your relevant responsible adult, share with us @eons_learning, #HomeostasisEons


activity 2: Longitudinal Activity: Making a Model of the Human Body

Throughout this unit, you’ll be learning about a lot of different body systems. Sometimes, it can be a little tricky to keep them all straight and know what goes where (though we do stick to pretty intuitive systems, here). It’s helpful to see what all of the systems look like and how they all fit together. So, throughout this unit, we’ll have you make a model of the human body!

This can be made of whatever you want. We’ll let you know what important parts of each organ system to include as we go through the unit. The main thing is to have you see what everything looks like and where it fits together. Some ideas are construction paper, clay/PlayDoh, and drawings.

For today, brainstorm what materials you might like to include and make some sort of “shell” or outline of where you’re going to put all of your organ system models. It might be helpful to get an overall idea of where the different organ systems are and how they are organized so that you can plan well. You won’t need to build the parts of the model until later.

Here’s a good video overview of the organ systems, if it’s helpful: