Learning about our lungs

We have been talking about our bodies.

Today we wondered where the air goes in our bodies when we take a big breath. 

We considered that the breath might go to our tummies (but that is for food), to our heart (but that is for blood), to our boobs (they are for milk), to our chest (yes, but where?) or to our skeletons (but they are for our bones).

Now we know that each breath we take goes to our lungs.

This is what one lung would look a bit like:

When our ribs squash in and our diaphragms squash up the air is forced to leave our lungs.

When our ribs move out and our diaphragms move down then the air rushes into our lungs.

the balloon is like the lung, the cut balloon on the bottom is like the diaphragm and the bottle is like our ribs.  We can see how it all works now.

Teacher also told us how our nice pink lungs can end up brown or black if we smoke.

We like our lungs to work well so we think that smoking is not such a good idea!

So...then we were wondering how big our lungs really are.

Well, if we can blow water out of a bottle we can see how much air we had in our lungs.

We tried this.

We have quite big lungs, but teachers are enormous (she emptied the WHOLE bottle!)

Lastly we talked about what happens when we sneeze (or cough).  How fast does your breath travel then (about the speed of a car) and how far would it travel.

We can't see breath or germs so teacher filled a balloon with glitter and flour before blowing up the balloon.

We couldn't wait to burst the balloon and see how far and how fast the air and germs travel.

AMAZING!
We will definitely try and catch our sneezes and our coughs in our elbows to prevent our sneezes and germs travelling all over the class.
We are becoming lung experts!