Body Sculptures and Their Internal Organs
Teaching Ms. Parker’s 6th grade class was absolutely wonderful and also a great learning experience for me. The body/organ project was taught a few years ago by PAA. Due to its previous success, Ms. Parker suggested it be this year’s 6th grade STEM project. I immediately became very excited and began thinking of ways to make it interactive.
This class began with students splitting up into groups of four. One person in each group volunteered to be wrapped with clear packing tape. This was done to achieve the outer form of the body. Students then cut the mold off carefully and pieced it back together. This part of the project was both unusual and fun for all of us! Being careful not to wrap the volunteers too tightly, the students displayed a lot of trust, laughter, caring, and patience for each other. You couldn’t have asked for better collaboration between the students. One of the students being wrapped was so still. While his classmates swarmed around him with tape, he didn’t want to move and mess it up . It was both comical and endearing.
After the clear body shell was constructed, we began making the organs. The heart and lungs were made to inflate. This was done by using tubing that viewers would blow into. When I first demonstrated how these organs would work the students were unsure about how go about creating them. However, once we broke down the construction of each organ they became much more comfortable and looked forward to seeing each one came to fruition. Once finished they kept blowing into the lung and heart tubes making sure each achieved proper inflation.
The best part of this class was when they installed the organs into the body. It was really fun watching the students work with each other and seeing their sculptures come together. Ms. Parker encouraged them to give their body sculpture a name and come up with a prop or a sign to give the viewer a little backstory. One girl was having problems inflating one of her lungs while blowing into the tube. You could see just how frustrated she was. Then she said loudly, “My lungs aren’t inflating like they should!” Ms. Parker quickly asked her, “Well, what is it called when a person’s lungs don’t fill up like they should?” Stumbling onto a wonderful learning moment, we discussed that certain illness, and they decided to call her body sculpture Asthma Annie. The next day Ms. Parker brought in an empty asthma pump case for Annie to hold as a prop. Brilliant!
