# data[].attributes.body
There are some very good inquiry based approaches to teaching the digestive system present in this book which I have incorporated into lessons.

# data[].attributes.body
Many students struggle with diagram usage and retention, and this short piece provides ways in which students performance in this area could be improved over time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Improving high school science learning by promoting students' use of diagrams

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the best experience on this site, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

# data[].attributes.body
Collection of Resources related to the digestive system

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Official education portal of the Department of Education and Skills in Ireland. Curriculum focused resources and support for primary and post primary teachers.

# data[].attributes.body
Students in my class will as much as possible be given the opportunity to express themselves. When drawing a diagram of the digestive system, students will often add extra drawing such as hair and facial features to the drawing. This is not a sign of bad behaviour, but more their creative side shining through. As long as the students engage with the activity at hand, the teacher should not dampen creativity as it can ruin the enjoyment for a child and taint their development.

# data[].attributes.body
Students should be encouraged to engage well with group work activities. Students enjoy when you use real life analogies to convey the importance of certain aspects. For example, Barcelona played like a team of individuals. Individually, the players on their team may have been better on those of the liverpool team, but their cooperation and their ability to work as a team; cohesively as a unit allowed them to win.

# data[].attributes.body
The systems in biology, if not approached in the correct manner can become very information intensive. However, students skill in being able to manage the information will be developed through the teaching of these topics. This can be facilitated and made easier by the type of lessons that the teacher incorporates in their Units.

# data[].attributes.headline
Easy Reading Age Digestive System Article

# data[].attributes.subject
Easy Reading Age Digestive System Article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Digestive System

Watch this movie about your digestive system, the system that handles the food you eat.

What's Saliva (Spit) Do?

Even before you eat, when you smell a tasty food, see it, or think about it, digestion begins. Saliva (say: suh-LYE-vuh), or spit, begins to form in your mouth.

When you do eat, the saliva breaks down the chemicals in the food a bit, which helps make the food mushy and easy to swallow. Your tongue helps out, pushing the food around while you chew with your teeth. When you're ready to swallow, the tongue pushes a tiny bit of mushed-up food called a bolus (say: BO-luss) toward the back of your throat and into the opening of your esophagus, the second part of the digestive tract.

What's the Esophagus?

The esophagus (say: ih-SOF-eh-guss) is like a stretchy pipe that's about 10 inches (25 centimeters) long. It moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. But also at the back of your throat is your windpipe, which allows air to come in and out of your body. When you swallow a small ball of mushed-up food or liquids, a special flap called the epiglottis (say: ep-ih-GLOT-iss) flops down over the opening of your windpipe to make sure the food enters the esophagus and not the windpipe.

If you've ever drunk something too fast, started to cough, and heard someone say that your drink "went down the wrong way," the person meant that it went down your windpipe by mistake. This happens when the epiglottis doesn't have enough time to flop down, and you cough involuntarily (without thinking about it) to clear your windpipe.

Once food has entered the esophagus, it doesn't just drop right into your stomach. Instead, muscles in the walls of the esophagus move in a wavy way to slowly squeeze the food through the esophagus. This takes about 2 or 3 seconds.

What Does the Stomach Do?

Your stomach, which is attached to the end of the esophagus, is a stretchy sack shaped like the letter J. It has three important jobs:

1. to store the food you've eaten

2. to break down the food into a liquidy mixture

3. to slowly empty that liquidy mixture into the small intestine

The stomach is like a mixer, churning and mashing together all the small balls of food that came down the esophagus into smaller and smaller pieces. It does this with help from the strong muscles in the walls of the stomach and gastric (say: GAS-trik) juices that also come from the stomach's walls. In addition to breaking down food, gastric juices also help kill bacteria that might be in the eaten food.

Onward to the small intestine!

What Does the Small Intestine Do?

The small intestine (say: in-TESS-tin) is a long tube that's about 1½ inches to 2 inches (about 3.5 to 5 centimeters) around, and it's packed inside you beneath your stomach. If you stretched out an adult's small intestine, it would be about 22 feet long (6.7 meters) - that's like 22 notebooks lined up end to end, all in a row!

The small intestine breaks down the food mixture even more so your body can absorb all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. The grilled chicken on your pizza is full of proteins - and a little fat - and the small intestine can help extract them with a little help from three friends: the pancreas (say: PAN-kree-uss), liver, and gallbladder.

Those organs send different juices to the first part of the small intestine. These juices help to digest food and allow the body to absorb nutrients. The pancreas makes juices that help the body digest fats and protein. A juice from the liver called bile helps to absorb fats into the bloodstream. And the gallbladder serves as a warehouse for bile, storing it until the body needs it.

Your food may spend as long as 4 hours in the small intestine and will become a very thin, watery mixture. It's time well spent because, at the end of the journey, the nutrients from your pizza, orange, and milk can pass from the intestine into the blood. Once in the blood, your body is closer to benefiting from the complex carbohydrates in the pizza crust, the vitamin C in your orange, the protein in the chicken, and the calcium in your milk.

Next stop for these nutrients: the liver! And the leftover waste - parts of the food that your body can't use - goes on to the large intestine.

How Does the Liver Help With Digestion?

The nutrient-rich blood comes directly to the liver for processing. The liver filters out harmful substances or wastes, turning some of the waste into more bile. The liver even helps figure out how many nutrients will go to the rest of the body, and how many will stay behind in storage. For example, the liver stores certain vitamins and a type of sugar your body uses for energy.

What Does the Large Intestine Do?

At 3 or 4 inches around (about 7 to 10 centimeters), the large intestine is fatter than the small intestine and it's almost the last stop on the digestive tract. Like the small intestine, it is packed into the body, and would measure 5 feet (about 1.5 meters) long if you spread it out.

What's the Appendix?

The large intestine has a tiny tube with a closed end coming off it called the appendix (say: uh-PEN-dix). It's part of the digestive tract, but it doesn't seem to do anything, though it can cause big problems because it sometimes gets infected and needs to be removed.

Like we mentioned, after most of the nutrients are removed from the food mixture there is waste left over - stuff your body can't use. This stuff needs to be passed out of the body. Can you guess where it ends up? Well, here's a hint: It goes out with a flush.

What's the Colon?

Before it goes, it passes through the part of the large intestine called the colon (say: CO-lun), which is where the body gets its last chance to absorb the water and some minerals into the blood. As the water leaves the waste product, what's left gets harder and harder as it keeps moving along, until it becomes a solid. Yep, it's poop (also called stool or a bowel movement).

What's the Rectum? And What's the Anus?

The large intestine pushes the poop into the rectum (say: REK-tum), the very last stop on the digestive tract. The solid waste stays here until you are ready to go to the bathroom. When you go to the bathroom, you are getting rid of this solid waste by pushing it through the anus (say: AY-nus). There's the flush we were talking about!

How Can I Keep My Digestive System Healthy?

You can help your digestive system by drinking water and eating a healthy diet that includes foods rich in fiber. High-fiber foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, make it easier for poop to pass through your system.

The digestive system is a pretty important part of your body. Without it, you couldn't get the nutrients you need to grow properly and stay healthy. And next time you sit down to lunch, you'll know where your food goes - from start to finish!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The digestive system breaks down the food you eat. Learn how in this article for kids.

# data[].attributes.body
Another video that gets students thinking about the food they eat, and the type of diet they have.

# data[].attributes.headline
[Chosen Learning Outcome] - Digestive System Lesson Plan  

# data[].attributes.subject
[Chosen Learning Outcome] - Digestive System Lesson Plan  

# data[].attributes.body
BW4: Describe the structure, function, and interactions of the organs of the human digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems.

# data[].attributes.headline
Food and Digestion Lesson plan for First Year Group 1A

# data[].attributes.subject
Food and Digestion Lesson plan for First Year Group 1A

# data[].attributes.headline
Unit of Learning Weeks 4-8 for First Year Group 1A

# data[].attributes.subject
Unit of Learning Weeks 4-8 for First Year Group 1A

# data[].attributes.body
I have always personally enjoyed Crash Course's fun approach and content rich videos. Their videos on the digestive system are comprehensive, but quite long. Too long to show in a class without losing the attention of some students. May be a good homework activity where students answer questions on the video.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Digestive System, Part 1: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #33

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Science Collaborative Planning Document - interactive

# data[].attributes.body
BW6: evaluate how human health is affected by: inherited factors and environmental factors including nutrition: lifestyle choices; examine the role of micro-organisms in human health
- Digestive system and understanding of the digestive system is underpinned by the understanding of diet and the effects foods can have on your body. It is important that these learning outcomes are interwoven in relation to the digestive system.
NOS1: appreciate how scientists work and how scientific ideas are modified over time.
- By getting students to draw what they think the digestive system may look like before learning and studying it; students are invited to appreciate how difficult it may have been to make judgments and drawings of anatomical structures when dissection of human bodies was forbidden.

# data[].attributes.body
Designed this sheet as a simple activity for my students to complete. Students must follow the path of the digestive system and fill in the ovals with the name of the organ and its role in digestion.

# data[].attributes.body
Short videos with some lovely concepts. Affective introduction mentioning the importance of our digestive system over the course of our lifetime. It also has a really nice graphic towards the start where in all the organs fly into position in the body, which would give students a good idea of how everything fits together. Some of the information from 50 seconds to around 1:35 is a little complex for first years but the rest of the videos information is useful.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How your digestive system works - Emma Bryce

# data[].attributes.headline
National Geographic Facts on Digestive system

# data[].attributes.subject
National Geographic Facts on Digestive system

# data[].attributes.body
I like

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The digestive system is the series of tubelike organs that convert our meals into body fuel. There are about 30 feet (9 meters) of these convoluted pipeworks, starting with the mouth and ending with the anus. Along the way, food is broken down, sorted, and reprocessed before being circulated around the body to nourish and replace cells and supply energy to our muscles.

Changing Food to Fuel

Food on the plate must be converted into a mashed-up, gooey liquid for the digestive system to be able to split it up into its constituent parts: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. Our teeth start the process by chewing and grinding up each mouthful, while the tongue works it into a ball-shaped bolus for swallowing.

Moistening saliva fed into the mouth from nearby glands starts the process of chemical digestion using specialized proteins called enzymes. Secreted at various points along the digestive tract, enzymes break down large molecules of food into smaller molecules that the body is able to absorb.

Once we swallow, digestion becomes involuntary. Food passes down the throat to the esophagus, the first of a succession of hollow organs that transport their contents through muscular contractions known as peristalsis.

The esophagus empties into the stomach, a large, muscular chamber that mixes food up with digestive juices including the enzyme pepsin, which targets proteins, and lipase, which works on fats. Hydrochloric acid likewise helps to dissolve the stomach contents while killing potentially harmful bacteria. The resulting semifluid paste-chyme-is sealed in the stomach by two ringlike sphincter muscles for several hours and then released in short bursts into the duodenum.

The first of three sections of the small intestine, the duodenum, produces large quantities of mucus to protect the intestinal lining from acid in the chyme.

Measuring about 20 feet (6 meters) in length, the small intestine is where the major digestion and absorption of nutrients take place. These nutrients are taken into the bloodstream, via millions of tiny, fingerlike projections called villi, and transported to the liver.

What's left in the digestive tract passes into the large intestine, where it's eaten by billions of harmless bacteria and mixed with dead cells to form solid feces. Water is reabsorbed into the body while the feces are moved into the rectum to await expulsion.

Other Key Players

Other organs that play a key role in digestion include the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas. The pancreas is a gland organ located behind the stomach that manufactures a cocktail of enzymes that are pumped into the duodenum. A duct also connects the duodenum to the gallbladder. This pear-shaped sac squeezes out green-brown bile, a waste product collected from the liver that contains acids for dissolving fatty matter.

The liver itself is the body's main chemical factory, performing hundreds of different functions. It processes nutrients absorbed into the blood by the small intestine, creating energy-giving glycogen from sugary carbohydrates and converting dietary proteins into new proteins needed for our blood. These are then stored or released as needed, as are essential vitamins and minerals. The liver also breaks down unwanted chemicals, such as any alcohol consumed, which is detoxified and passed from the body as waste.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The digestive system is the series of tubelike organs that convert our meals into body fuel. There are about 30 feet (9 meters) of these convoluted pipeworks, starting with the mouth and ending with the anus. Along the way, food is broken down, sorted, and reprocessed before being circulated around the body to nourish and replace cells and supply energy to our muscles.