Science From the Heart

Karen Ansberry and Emily Morgan

It’s a fact: kids today are less fit than they were only a generation ago. Many are showing early signs of cardiovascular risk factors such as physical inactivity, excess weight, and higher blood cholesterol. Now more than ever, it is important to teach children how to keep their hearts healthy. The following books and activities engage students in simple heart investigations and help them learn that regular physical activity can promote heart health.

This Month’s Trade Books

Hear Your Heart
By Paul Showers.
Illustrated by Holly Keller.
33 pp. HarperCollins. 2001.
ISBN 0064451399.
Grades K–4
Synopsis
This Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science book provides a simple explanation of the structure of the heart and how it works. Includes diagrams and hands-on activities.

The Heart: Our Circulatory System
By Seymour Simon.
32 pp. Mulberry Books. 1996.
ISBN 0688170595.
Grades K–4
Synopsis
Full-color photographs, diagrams, and text describe the heart, blood, and blood vessels and how they function.

Curricular Connections

This month’s activities combine learning about the heart and circulatory system with lessons about personal health. In the K–3 lesson, students listen to each other’s hearts, participate in a simple activity to find out how exercise affects heart rate, read about the heart in Paul Showers’ Hear Your Heart, and make a graph of favorite heart healthy activities. In the 4–6 lesson, Seymour Simon’s The Heart provides information to help students design their own heart-rate experiments.

Learning how to keep the heart healthy while learning how it works gives real-life context to the material. The heart contracts and relaxes automatically as it pumps blood to all parts of the body through an intricate system of blood vessels. A healthy heart makes a “lub-dub” sound with each beat. This sound comes from the valves shutting inside the heart. Blood leaves the left side of your heart and travels through blood vessels called arteries, which gradually divide into capillaries. Inside capillaries in the lungs, oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange occurs, and in the intestines, nutrient/waste exchange occurs. The blood then travels in veins back to the right side of your heart, and the whole process begins again.

You can feel each time the heart squeezes a jet of blood into the arteries by finding your pulse. Two good places to find it are on the side of your neck just below the chin (the carotid artery pulse) and on the inside of your wrist just below the thumb (the radial artery pulse). When you are resting, you will probably feel between 70 and 100 beats per minute. A child’s resting heart rate is faster than an adult’s.

Because the heart is a muscle, exercising it helps keep it healthy and strong. The American Heart Association recommends you do some sort of cardiovascular exercise for 30–60 minutes most days of the week. Cardiovascular, or aerobic, exercise is moderate exercise done for a long period of time that gets your heart rate up, such as running.

For Grades K–3: Hearing Hearts

Engage: Begin by asking students, “What is the most important part of your body?” “Why do you think so?” Responses will vary, but tell students that they will be learning about an organ they couldn’t live without: the heart. Using an overhead transparency of the Your Heart Anticipation Guide as a preassessment tool (see NSTA Connection), read the statements about the heart (e.g., true or false: Your heart beats slower when you exercise) and have the class discuss whether they think each statement is true or false. Mark answers in the “Before” column of the anticipation guide. At the end of the lesson, students will complete the “After” column.

Explore/Explain: Have students look at their closed fists. Tell students that the human heart is about the size of a fist. Have them place their fists against their chests and explain that most of the heart is located a little left of center in the ribcage. Give each pair of students a cardboard paper-towel or toilet-paper tube “stethoscope.” Have them take turns listening to each other’s heartbeats by putting one end of the tube on the left side of their partner’s chest and placing their ear to the other end. This can be a sensitive activity for some students. If a child seems anxious, suggest they listen to your heartbeat. Make sure students are silent during this activity. After all students have had a chance to listen to their partner’s heart, ask, “What does your partner’s heart sound like?” “Do you think the sound will change if we exercise before listening?”

Have students do some sort of cardiovascular exercise, such as marching to music or running in place, for one minute. Then have them repeat the cardboard stethoscope activity. Ask, “How does your partner’s heart sound different after exercising?” Students will comment they hear heartbeats that are quicker or stronger.

Next, show students the book Hear Your Heart, and explain that it is a nonfiction book that can help them find out more about the heart. Read the book aloud, skipping pages 12–21 to focus on the portions of the book about the heartbeat and pulse. Then ask,

• Is the heart a muscle? (yes)
• How do you keep your muscles strong? (exercise them)
• What can you do to keep your heart strong? (exercise it by running, jumping, playing sports, and so on)
• How often should you do these activities every week? (most days for 30–60 minutes)

Elaborate: Make a large “Busy Body” graph by labeling the x-axis “Favorite Physical Activities” and the y-axis “Number of Students.” Brainstorm a list of five or six cardiovascular activities that students enjoy and write them along the x-axis. Pass out “Busy Body” cutouts (see NSTA Connection) and have students write their name and their favorite activity from the choices listed. Next, have students tape their cutouts on the graph to create a pictograph of favorite activities and then analyze the graph together. Tell students that they can keep their hearts strong by keeping their bodies busy with fast-paced physical activity for 30–60 minutes most days of the week.

Evaluate: Revisit the anticipation guide. Have the class consider again whether each statement is true or false, and mark the answers in the “After” column. Discuss evidence for each statement from the activities and the reading, such as, “Our hearts are muscles so they need exercise like our other muscles.”

NSTA Connection

Click the highlighted words to download the K-3 heart anticipation guide, answer key, and busy body cutout.

Resources

National Research Council (NRC). 1996. National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Internet

American Heart Association
www.americanheart.org

For Grades 4–6: What Gets the Heart Pumping?

Engage: Have students quickly open and close their fists over and over again until their hands get tired. Tell them that their fist-sized heart squeezes this way every second of every day.

Explore: Next, demonstrate how to measure your heart rate at your wrist or neck. Students may have to try a few different spots until they feel a soft beating. This beating is called a pulse, and it is caused by the heart squeezing blood through their body. Tell students that their pulse can tell them how fast their heart is beating if they count the number of beats for one minute (or multiply how many times their heart beats in 15 seconds by four). Students can graph their heart rates, compare the heart rates of different students, and find the average heart rate of their class.

Explain: Ask students to share with a partner something they know or have heard about the heart, such as “the heart has four chambers in it, people can get artificial hearts.” Pass out to each student a copy of the Anticipation Guide (see NSTA Connection). Read aloud the book The Heart: Our Circulatory System. Read only pages 4–9 (“Make a fist…”) and page 22 (“The heart pushes…”) as this book is somewhat lengthy to read aloud cover-to-cover. Ask students to listen to find out if each statement on the anticipation guide is true or false, marking whether they agree or disagree with each statement on Part 1. After reading, have students complete Part 2 and provide evidence for whether they agree or disagree with each statement.

Elaborate: The American Heart Association recommends that we do 30–60 minutes of cardiovascular exercise most days of the week. Have teams of students design investigations to determine ways they could get better cardiovascular exercise during their free time, such as In which activity is your heart beating the fastest: playing a hand-held video game, jogging, or jumping rope? To help them understand the concept of a fair test, students should get their procedure approved by the teacher before carrying out the experiment. Ask, “How will you keep the experiment fair?” (doing the activity for the same amount of time, taking their pulse in the same way each time, and so on) and “How will you record and organize your data?” (writing it in a table).

Evaluate: Have students create a “Healthy Heart” poster. The poster should include the following criteria:

• The question the team was investigating.
• The procedure they used for the experiment.
• A data table or graph to show results.
• The team’s conclusion and evidence to support it.
• A list of ways to keep the heart healthy.

Have students share their posters at a Healthy Heart poster session.

Karen Ansberry (karen@pictureperfectscience.com) is the elementary science curriculum leader at Mason City Schools in Mason, Ohio. Emily Morgan (emily@pictureperfectscience.com) is the science consultant at the Hamilton County Educational Service Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. They are the authors of Picture-Perfect Science Lessons: Using Children’s Books to Guide Inquiry, available from NSTA Press. Special thanks to second-grade teacher Kristin Riekels and her students at Western Row Elementary in Mason, Ohio, for their help in field-testing these activities.

NSTA Connection

Click the highlighted words to download the 4-6 heart anticipation guide and answer key.

Click here for PDF file.