Valentine Surprise Activity Box, Day 8 - The Heart

Our Valentine surprise box took on a science theme today, with a Bio-Signs Heart Kit from Tedco Toys. It is a nice puzzle style model, with a brief explanation of the what the heart is, and how it works.


The only thing the kit could use is a better explanation of each of the parts of the heart. For that, we turned to the books in the box. The picture above is from Seymour Simon's The Heart: Our Circulatory System...


...though I think I prefer The Magic School Bus Has a Heart, for child friendliness...


...or maybe Paul Showers' Hear Your Heart, from the Stage 2, Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science series. We've read Hear Your Heart before, and followed Showers' suggestion for using empty toilet paper tubes as simple stethoscopes. I threw a few of those into the box too, just in case the younger children wanted to try that out again.


I also included a title from Marc Brown, which is not so much a science book, as a story about a play on words. But, it does include a terrific suggestion for a homemade model of the heart in the illustrations.


And, just for fun, I included, Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, because I have a teenage boy in the house, who has been complaining about Valentine's Day being a fru-fru-just-for-girls holiday.

And speaking of just for fun, the final items in the box are small bag chocolate hearts, you know, for comparison, and a peanut butter cookie mix, left over from Aunt Esther's Christmas care package, in case we need to make cookies, once we're done comparing the chocolates to the heart model. Nothing goes better with peanut butter cookies, than chocolate hearts to press into the tops.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with Mouse Grows Mouse Learns' What My Child is Reading, and Science Sunday at The Adventures of Mommydom.