Curriculum
“What we learn with pleasure we never forget.” Alfred Mercier
The curriculum focuses on human body anatomy and physiology and we will be covering many conditions such as asthma, diabetes, heart disease, sickle cell disease. In addition to encouraging children to have healthy lifestyles and thereby minimize the probability that they will develop these conditions or suffer the worst consequences of them, the curriculum will help their development of scientific inquiry, problem-solving skills, enhance their language skills and vocabulary and they will also learn about careers in healthcare.
The instructional units will contain a mix of:
- Experiments
- Hands-on activities
- Demonstrations
- Reading comprehension skills
- Games
- Simulated role play
- Quizzes
- Writing
- Maths and interpreting results
Units:
- Circulatory System
- Respiratory System
- Digestive System
- Neurology and the Brain
- Vision and Hearing
- Muskeloskeletal System including joints
- Infectious diseases
- Genetics
- Immunology
- Nutrition
Brief summary of what is involved in some of the units:
- Cardiology: We will focus on understanding the heart in the context of the circulatory system and how blood pressure, heart rate and exercise affect the health of the heart. Students will be visualising heart models to understand its anatomy, design their own experiments to understand heart rate and they will also learn how to take blood pressure. We will also be going through medical cases’ history, examination and investigations (including blood results, ECG etc) to understand problems that can occur with the heart further.
- Respiratory: Students will be learning the anatomy by building a layered model, they will find out what their lung volumes are and its significance. We will simulate what it feels like to have an asthma attack and discuss the pathophysiology of asthma, how do doctors diagnose it and how to use a peak flow meter for monitoring symptoms and control. We will also cover the issue of smoking, its harmful effects on the body and connection with the brain. Students will also appreciate what it means to calculate smoking pack years.
- Digestive: Students will walk through the digestive process and build a digestive system model in its true length! We will diagnose diabetes using simulated blood and urine (using glucometers and urine strips!) through a case study and do an experiment to “see” why diabetics have frequent thirst and urination. We will also do a simulated role play of the action of insulin on the body and how glucose is utilized and what happens when insulin is insufficient.
- Neurology: Here we will be making neurons, building brains, understand the importance of wearing helmets and protecting our brain. We will understand how we see and how seeing is connected to our brain. Discuss blind spot and color blindness.
- Genetics: We will be classifying acquired and inherited traits and understand that inherited traits pass from one generation to the next. We will build information about traits from DNA codes.
- Infectious disease: Here we aim to provide students with the basic skills and information necessary to understand communicable diseases. Students create models of germs, act out the response of the immune system, watch how germs spread, solve epidemiological mysteries, and test methods for killing germs.