The Human Heart

Today we learned a little about the Human Heart. I printed off a picture of a heart diagram and we talked about the different parts and how it functions. They were pretty fascinated, and at the same time grossed out at the picture and didn't want to believe that their hearts didn't look like this...

I also found some fun facts for the kiddos, here were just a few of the favorites...

- Everyday the heart creates enough energy to drive a truck 20 miles!

- During an average lifetime, the heart will pump nearly 1.5 million gallons of blood - enough to fill 200 train tank cars!

- When the body is at rest, it takes only 6 seconds for the blood to go from the heart to the lungs and back, only 8 seconds to go to the brain and back and only 16 seconds to reach the toes and travel all the way back to the heart! 

There were many other really interesting ones as well, the kids really enjoyed it.  :) We tried finding our pulse on our wrists, but it was much more difficult than our necks.

We took our pulse at our resting rate as we were sitting there talking...

Then, we ran around the room for a couple minutes!

Afterwards we took our active heart rate and the kids were excited that it was so much faster!

We read in a few more of our books later in the day about exercise and taking good care of your heart.

We ended our heart study with a little treat (Mommy's new favorite!) A yummy heart shaped chocolate from the www.naturalcandystore.com - They are SO GOOD! Way better than a Hershey's Kiss or Dove bar...so delicious!

And Joy said that she's going to continue thinking that her heart looks like this, "because it's much prettier!"