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Lesson Plan
Lesson Preview | Objectives

Lesson Preview Have you ever cut yourself? If you have, you have probably seen your own blood. Blood is like a cargo train inside your body. It carries nutrients and oxygen to every part of your body, and it carries waste materials away. Your heart is the powerful engine that pumps the blood throughout your entire body. Animals and humans have body systems. Some of these body systems transport nutrients. Some transport oxygen and carbon dioxide. In this Lesson, we will learn about three body systems:the circulatory system, the respiratory system and the digestive system. Objectives When you have completed this lesson, you will be able to

explain that many organisms have special structures to help transport of materials, describe how blood circulates through the heart chambers, lungs, and body and how carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen (O2) are exchanged in the lungs and tissues, list the steps of digestion and the roles of teeth and the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and colon in the function of the digestive system, and understand the role of the kidney in removing waste from the blood and converting it to urine, which is stored in the bladder.

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Instruction 3-1
The Circulatory System | The Respiratory System | The Digestive System

The Circulatory System

CCSTD Science Grade 5 2.a., b.

The Circulatory System is one of the most important transportation systems in your body. It is made up of your heart, blood vessels and lungs. In brief, it works like this: Blood, pumped by your heart, circulates continuously throughout your body. It carries oxygen and nutrients to your cells and removes waste products so your body can dispose of them. Obviously, we need to give you a little more detail about how the system works. How the System Works 1. When you inhale, you breathe in air, which is pulled into your lungs. 2. In your lungs, oxygen from this breathed-in air mixes with the blood that's been pumped in from your heart. 3. This blood, now mixed with oxygen, travels back to your heart. The heart then pumps the oxygen-rich blood through a system of blood vessels to every cell in your body. It leaves through the left side of your heart and starts its journey in your aorta, which is the biggest artery in your body. 4. The aorta branches out into smaller arteries, which then branch out into even smaller ones. 5. Finally the blood reaches the smallest blood vessels of all, the capillaries, which are located inside body tissues. The blood delivers oxygen and nutrients to your cells through these capillaries, where it exchanges the oxygen and nutrients for carbon dioxide, waste. 6. Your blood (which now contains carbon dioxide and waste, instead of oxygen and nutrients) returns to your heart through a different system of blood vessels. These blood vessels are called veins. 7. Your heart now pumps the blood back to your lungs to pick up fresh oxygen and eliminate carbon dioxide -- which you do by exhaling.

That's the Circulatory System, which is also called the Cardiovascular System. It's an amazing system made up of some pretty astonishing components -- which include your blood, your blood vessels, your heart and your lungs. Blood Blood makes up about 5% of the body weight of most human beings. Most of your blood is a colorless liquid called plasma (which is mostly water). This plasma contains 3 major substances: red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. Red Blood Cells. Red blood cells make up nearly half the volume of your blood. They contain a protein called hemoglobin, which is what gives blood its red color. Blood looks red when it leaves the lungs after being mixed with oxygen. It can look blue when it returns to your lungs filled with waste and carbon dioxide. White Blood Cells. There are two different kinds of white blood cells. Some help repair injured tissues. Others help provide immunity by devouring incoming bacteria that can cause disease. Platelets assist in the clotting of blood and also help your body repair itself after injury. Blood cells regularly wear out and die. Red blood cells die at a rate of about 200,000 million per day. Replacements are made in your bone marrow at a rate of about 9,000 million per hour. In addition to carrying oxygen and nutrients to the cells and removing waste, blood distributes heat throughout the bodies of many animals. You've heard about "warm blooded" and "cold blooded" animals. With a few exceptions, all mammals and birds are warm-blooded -- while all reptiles, insects, arachnids, amphibians and fish are cold-blooded. Warm-blooded creatures try to keep the insides of their bodies at a constant temperature. They do this by generating their own heat when they are in a cooler

environment and by cooling themselves when they are in a hotter environment. To generate heat, warm-blooded animals convert food (chemical energy) into mechanical energy. They have to eat more food than cold-blooded animals to maintain a constant body temperature. Only a small amount of a warmblooded animal's food turns into body mass. The rest is used to maintain this constant body temperature.

Blood Vessels If you look at the Earth from space, it looks blue. In fact, Earth is called The Blue Planet. That's because more than 70% of its surface is covered by water, which looks blue from space. So far as we know, there are no other planets with liquid water in our Solar System, although Mars may have had some in the past. There are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels (arteries and veins) in the Circulatory System. These blood vessels are like a rubbery pipeline of tubes or hoses. The tubes that carry blood away from your heart are called arteries. They carry blood to smaller tubes and then to the smallest tubes of all, the capillaries. The tubes that bring waste and carbon dioxide back to the heart are called veins.

Your Heart Your heart is a muscle -- a pump -- about the size of a clenched fist. It contracts and relaxes some 70 or so times a minute when you are resting and even more when you exercise. When you exercise, your heart pumps more blood to the part of your body that needs it. When you run a race, for example, the heart pumps more blood to your legs as the race continues. Your heart squeezes and pumps blood through its chambers to all parts of the body through a system of big and small blood vessels. An adult heart pumps nearly 4000 gallons of blood every day. A heartbeat is one complete contraction of the heart. The average heart will beat about 30 million times each year. Summarizing the Process Just to summarize --the circulatory process begins when blood pumped to your lungs mixes with oxygen from the air you breathe in (inhale). This blood transports nutrients and oxygen to every cell in your body, where it exchanges these nutrients and oxygen for waste and carbon dioxide. It then carries the waste and carbon dioxide back to your heart and lungs, where you expel the carbon dioxide by breathing out (exhaling). We'll tell you about the lungs in our next Instruction, which is about The Respiratory System.

Video Instruction

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Circulatory System [2:58] Circulatory System [2:01] Circulation [1:08]

Experiments for Home and Classroom

Here are several classroom activities designed to help students understand the heart and the Circulatory System. Although it is suggested that a beef heart be used in one of the activities, ignore this activity if you fear students may be too squeamish -there are plenty of other activities. Click: http://sln.fi.edu/tfi/activity/bio/bio-5.html This "heart beat" game is designed for younger students (K-3) but would be fun for anyone since it involves making a primitive stethoscope and listening to somebody else's heartbeat. Ignore the suggestion in the "discussion" section. Click: http://sln.fi.edu/tfi/activity/bio/bio-2.html Designed for teachers, this activity was created to help students understand the heart and its role in blood circulation. Click: http://www.colby.edu/cpse/equipment2/human/human.html#Circulatory %20System Reading List You can perform a search of the California Department of Education recommended literature for Math and Science database http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/sc/ll/ Asimov, Isaac: Fantastic Voyage (A science fiction classic about the exploration of various systems of the human body by a team of shrunk-to-fit scientists.) http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/sc/ll/ap/details.asp?id=237 Cole, Joanna: The Magic School Bus: Inside the Human Body http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/sc/ll/ap/details.asp?id=987

for Students, Parents and Teachers Now let's do Practice Exercise 3-1 (top). Choose printer friendly or online exercises. Printer friendly version requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5. Click HERE to obtain a free copy.

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