Respiration experiment and lesson

Sometimes science lessons don’t go well. Our respiration experiments were a lot of my inspiration for last week’s post about What to do when your experiment fails.  A lot.  One of our respiration experiments we never got to work.

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Respiration Experiment 1: breathing rate

Does anyone else remember doing this in elementary school?  I have a vague memory of doing this respiration experiment in 5th grade and having to run in place forever, or so it seemed.

The first time the kids did this I gave them instructions and turned them loose to accomplish the task.  They came back with answers like “I breathed 500 times while resting,” so we went back and redid the respiration experiment together.

This time our respiration experiment went much better.  I could understand though why they had such a hard time getting their data right.  It’s hard to be doing the exercise AND counting your breaths at the same time.  I’m not 100% convinced my data was correct, but it was close enough to show the results we expected.

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Respiration Experiment 1 results

1. The boys who do Kung Fu didn’t have their breathing rate go up as much at first
2. Eventually, their breathing rate went up, but it was not as much for Princess and I who don’t go to Kung Fu 3 times a week for almost an hour.
3. Some activities increased our breathing rate more: running, jumping, jumping jacks.
4. Some activities did not increase our breathing rate as much: yoga, push-ups, and sit-ups.
5. It is very hard to measure your breathing rate.

Respiration Experiment 2: Build a model lung

This one we never got to work.  We tried 3 different materials to act as the outer layer, and none worked.

We concluded it was improper materials that hampered our results in all 3 cases.

Looking at my anatomy board, here are some people who didn’t fail in this respiration experiment (yes I know it’s more of a demonstration, but no one searches for demonstrations).

• Enchanted Homeschooling Mom
• Yeah, I only found one out of 191 pins, and that one no longer exists says Future Ticia 2024

Respiration Experiment 3 Model

Finally, we wrapped it up using a book I found on Scholastic as one of their dollar finds (you have to wade through a lot of stuff to find a good book in there, this is filtered to ebooks and 3rd grade, and it changes all the time, The Body Book is no longer on their dollar deal, but they change all the time).

Here it is on Amazon: The Body Book: Easy-to-Make Hands-on Models That Teach

After a couple of false starts and lots of my explaining how to put the model together, we finally achieved a passable model of our lungs and how respiration works.

But finally after much wailing and gnashing of teeth everyone got their model done, and glued into our science notebook.

So, that’s all of our respiration experiments, from there we moved on to blood and learning all about that this week, which has been rather sticky.  I’ve still got a digestion experiment or two to sort through.  I’m such a mess right now.

More 3rd grade learning

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