Pulse – week 2 Crossmaglen

by Posted on April 20, 2011

We had an eventful second session – first of all we recalled the last days activities and how we had ended it by lining up for lunch, creating a special pattern with our selves! So this week we thought about other patterns that our own bodies make.

The children came up with some very important ones!

Our own body symmetry

breathing

heartbeat and pulse

We talked about our heartbeat and how we know we have one! Miss O’Sullivan, (teacher) encourages the children to complete 5 laps of the school regularly and so on hearing this, I was interested to know what the children noticed about their run and the effect on their bodies.

The children told me their breathing gets faster, they get tired and hot! Earlier that morning they had run some laps of the school and used a stethoscope to listen in to hear their heartbeats with the help of Gretta the classroom assistant, who is a nurse. We are so lucky to have such expert assistance! And the children knew exactly what they breathed in (oxygen) and what was breathed out (carbon dioxide).

So now after our discussion we tried to find another beat from our bodies – our pulse. Gretta helped us find it! She told us exactly how to do this, by using our two fingers (not our thumbs) and placing them on our wrist, or feeling in our neck for a pulse. In the end we all found something! This was one task, now we tried to draw our pulse, by thinking of how it felt. Some felt a soft beat, others described it like a mini heartbeat!

Some wonderful drawings were made.

What a strong pulse! Caolan's pulse Eoghans pulse Jessica's pulse These were the resting pulses and so in order to shake things up a bit we needed to be really active. The children were very enthusiastic to the idea of another run! Next thing they were heading out the door with their teacher, while I jumped up and down here in the studio to get my heartbeat raised! ready to go! This looked like hot work in the warm weather! keeping a steady pace keeping going well done! I had asked the children to begin slow, slowly get faster and at some point to do a fast run to really get the heart rate going……. great work! fantastic effort before the children had set off on their run, I had asked them to really tune into how they felt as they did this and at the end of the run to put their hand on their heart to see if they could feel the fast heartbeat! catching the heartbeat Finally the children were to come back into the classroom and make a drawing that related to their changing heartbeat and other drawings that were a memory of the place they ran. Unfortunately we lost our connection at the this point, but will pick up where we left off after Easter break. I hope everyone will be well rested! Well done for all that effort.