NAME OF LESSON: Blood and the Circulatory System

Subject Area: Biology

Age or Grade: Middle school

Estimated Length: 1-2 class periods

Prerequisite knowledge/skills:

Students will have covered the circulatory system, the composition of blood, and heart sounds/blood pressure in their textbooks. It is not mandatory that this has all been covered previously, as the topics will be reviewed in this lesson.

Description of New Content:

What causes the lub-dub heart sounds? Where does blood travel through the body? What is in blood? What is blood pressure and how is it measured?

Goals:

1. Students will listen to their own heart and a friend’s heart through a stethoscope, identifying the lub-dub sounds and understanding their cause.

2. Students will color a diagram of the circulatory system, blue for oxygenated blood (arteries), red for non-oxygenated blood (veins)

3. Students will make mock blood using candy in a soda bottle

4. Students will measure blood pressure and learn about blood pressure.

Materials Needed:

Diagrams of circulatory system, markers or colored pencils, blood pressure machine, stethoscopes, small clear soda bottles, from the cake decorating aisle in a grocery store: candy red hots, red sugar, small white decorative balls, chocolate jimmies

Procedure:

Students should rotate through stations, since there are not enough of certain materials for the whole class. Station 1 will be coloring the diagram, station 2 could be blood making (the cake decorations should be labeled for what they represent: red hots are red blood cells, white balls are white blood cells, chocolate jimmies are platelets, red sugar represents all the other dissolved things in plasma), station 3 could be stethoscopes, station 4 the blood pressure machine. Students should keep track of their data in their lab notebooks.

Opener: Begin by playing the sounds from the Virtual Stethoscope website (http://sprojects.mmi.mcgill.ca/mvs/mvsteth.htm), ask students how and why our circulatory system makes these sounds?

Development:

Have students travel to the various stations, which should have a teacher guide or clearly written instructions

Closure:

Discuss what new information they learned during class

Evaluation

Extensions

Try a blood-typing activity

Some blood type info for kids: http://www.fi.edu/biosci/blood/types.html

References

What’s in blood?

http://www.blood.co.uk/pages/e17compn.html

http://simscience.org/membranes/advanced/essay/blood_comp_and_func1.html

Blood Pressure, Pulse, Heart Sounds:

http://www.smm.org/heart/lessons/lesson5.htm

http://www.madsci.org/experiments/archive/859422898.Bi.html

http://www.webmd.com/hw/health_guide_atoz/hw201445.asp