I was in a curriculum meeting this past week as we planned for the upcoming Human Body unit. The teachers would teach the biology of systems in our bodies while also helping students better understand the concept of systems. This discussion took me back to an effort that my wife Margaret, Debbie Wright, and myself put forth at Hong Kong International School many years ago. Margaret was the media specialist and gifted coordinator. Debbie was the science coordinator, and I worked as the instructional technologist.

We participated in the grade-level curriculum planning meetings as part of our curriculum collaboration system. In preparation for the upcoming half-day planning meeting for the human body unit, we decided to brainstorm a bit to see if we could present some new ideas for teaching the unit. Our discussion quickly jumped into very creative territory as we wanted to use the teaching of the content knowledge to help the students understand the concepts of the unit. We also wanted a research component that would include students working in teams while producing authentic project(s) with the students driving the learning. We also hoped to connect to subject matter experts in the community while enticing our students to use multimedia and their communication skills to promote their assigned systems. We also connected to the new and exciting TV event of those days… reality TV, where folks were being voted off an island. It was 2004. 🙂

While this effort took place so long ago, I can remember enough that I decided it would be worth recording an EdTech Co-Op podcast to offer more information. Here is the link to that show. What we tried to do might offer readers some ideas as you approach teaching systems and human biology. Most elementary schools teach this topic. I found some of my notes from our proposal to interest you in listening to the podcast. They are listed below. I wrote them up for my third visit with the team of teachers as it was a hard sell trying to get some traction with our ideas.

I left out in the notes the most innovative aspect of our proposal. We wanted to empower the students to use their art, creativity, and construction skills to turn our building into what we would call the “student body.” In other words, teams of students assigned to specific systems (i.e., circulatory, skeleton, etc.) would turn parts of our school into their system. Think of the elevator in our eight-story building being the spinal cord with posters inside explaining the function of the spine and information on each floor explaining discs, nerves, etc. We wondered if the students would turn the library into the brain or if they would make the principal’s office the thinking center of our student body. 🙂

Here are my proposal notes. They are based on two previous meetings, so they might need clarification. But, between the podcast and these notes, they paint the picture and offer some ideas as you look to teach biology in an elementary school setting.

Phase I: Learning Individual Systems

Each teacher teaches an assigned system to their class. This class then becomes the headquarters for the system (e.g., Skeleton HQ). Each teacher will use media provided by the library and instructional materials from last year’s teaching materials to do some direct instruction to give students a foundation of knowledge.

Each system HQ would then experience a WebQuest where student teams (maybe partnered up) would go through the heavily scaffolded WebQuests gathering information leading up to a system scenario simulation (e.g., the skeleton system must deal with a broken leg, the circulatory system deals with a blood clot, etc.). The scenarios could be tiered, giving the more EL-like students more complex situations.

Phase II: Teaching and Promoting Individual Systems

The students move into applying their knowledge of their respective systems by building displays and teaching stations and creating advertisements to promote their systems. This could be a creative time as students use different types of intelligence to create image slideshows with voiceovers, videos, pamphlets, TV commercials, public speeches, etc. Students should work in teams for this phase. Parent volunteers would be helpful to have during this process.

Once all the work is completed in all the system HQs, classes visit each other’s classrooms to learn about the different systems. A standard questions template would be given to all the students, who would then answer the questions for each system HQ they enter.

Phase III: Whole System Jigsaw Simulations

Teachers would work together to create teams combining one student from each class into six-person jigsaw teams. A whole “4th Grade System Body” simulation would be initiated where each jigsaw team is given a template questionnaire guiding them through determining how they think all the systems would react individually and how their interconnectivity would affect the overall body. These explanations could be sent to doctors to evaluate and comment on the student’s findings. This would be more project-based, giving the students an authentic audience while applying their learning to real-life situations (e.g., bacterial infection and not eating for four days)

Conclusion: System Survivor

A few possibilities…

We could do a 4th-grade vote to decide which system is the least important and should be voted off the floor. The competitive nature of many of our students could engage them in building arguments, advertisements, and teaching stations that work to get their message across.

There could be a series of debates or public presentations where students from each system HQ get a couple of minutes to present their cases to a series of teacher judges.

Each system could prepare a DragonNews presentation to sell their system to the entire UPS. After all the presentations, there could be a school-wide vote to decide which system is the most important and should stay in the 4th-grade hall. We would not want a “loser” with the entire school voting. It could be painful.

Note: Remember that Margaret, Deb, and I would plan and prepare for this unit. Working as designers, we would check in with you as we develop the student questionnaires, WebQuests, scenarios, etc., to develop the materials based on the needs of your students. And we have a few months to do this work and get parent volunteers for the simulation activities. If we proceed with this proposal, I will work with Deb to align the standard and benchmarks with the unit template.

Image Sources: Human Body | HKIS Building