The Body Shark-Tastic - Grade 8 Science, Health & Physical Education Project

Purpose of Project:

The Body Shark-Tastic is a new interactive exhibition intended to educate others about the human body, its many systems, how they work and interact, as well as how everyday lifestyle choices can impact these systems in both positive and negative ways. Students were tasked with creating exhibits around specific body systems in order to answer the driving question:

How can we educate the public about the benefits of healthy lifestyle choices and the effect of physical activity on various systems in the human body?

Project Process:

The Body Shark-Tastic was a project 2 years in the making! Lots of collaborative discussion took place about the possibility of bringing together science, health and phys ed in a project surrounding body systems and overall health and wellness. The final impetus to making this project occur was the fact that we are a K-9 school and in December our gyms are taken over for a couple of weeks for our school holiday concerts. Because of this, and the fact that we live in Canada where the weather makes it challenging to go outside in December, our Phys Ed teachers were very open to trying something new during this time that would not require a gym.

The idea behind the name came from our school mascot (the Sharks) and an exhibit at our local science center entitled The Body Fantastic. We wanted to have students recreate an educational exhibit hall that would look at specific systems and how they contributed to overall health. This tied in very nicely with our grade 8 Health curriculum surrounding Wellness Choices and the Physical Education curriculum (see the Curriculum Design Map above). In science we laid the groundwork for weeks - students needed scaffolding background information in order to sythesize the ideas they would bring to the table once they had been assigned an exhibit.

Once we felt students were well prepared, we brought in our physical wellness component and reached out to the University of Alberta Physical Education Faculty who was only too happy to help us out! They allowed us to bring over our students to take part in physical strength and endurance testing - each student also received a full printout of their results and analysis - and toured the students through the different facilities that were available for testing overall athlete wellness and performance. The students had a fantastic time and we could see them starting to make connections with the scientific background knowledge they'd learned in class up to this point, and the practical applications they were experiencing on their tour.

Once students had had this experience, we brought it back to the science - they needed to look at how the different tests related to different systems in their bodies and how having good overall health contributed to proper functioning of each body system. We started to look at the interdependency between systems and how different life choices could impact individual systems as well as cause a 'domino effect' among several systems.

Students were then ready to start looking deeper into individual systems. The completed a Group Selection Input Form (see above) so they could have voice and choice in the exhibits they created and who they worked with . Of course, the form is an "input" form so we as teachers did make the final groups based on criteria we had decided as well (we told students groups needed to be mixed gender, for example, since males and females have different requirements for nutrition etc). Once students were assigned a system, they began planning and working. They were able to utilize time from all 3 subject disciplines in order to create their exhibits, conferencing with teachers from each along the way to receive feedback and discuss next steps. When mini-lessons were required to ensure students understood a specific concept, they were provided, but teachers were largely able to act as facilitators at this point, rather than directors. It was fantastic to see how seriously the students took their work and how different each of their exhibits turned out!

We scheduled our Showcase for the final day before Christmas Break - what better way to keep students involved and focussed on their learning! Because the purpose of the project was educating the public, we opened up our doors to all other classes as well as the general public. It was a packed house all day! Students had to include interactive components along with their information, and were required to include activities that were appropriate for different age groups - they were so creative!

Are there components to this project that still need some tweaking? Absolutely. I would have liked to bring the students to the aforementioned science center exhibit so they could critically evaluate how exhibits are set up for the general public, and I would like to spend more time actually planning the gallery set up with the students so they can design the flow of everything, but for a first time we were really happy with the outcome! Can't wait to try it again!