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Students get to the heart of the matter at health festival

By Sandy Mouat
CORRESPONDENT

Recently, the Lafayette Arts & Science Foundation sponsored the "Body Connections and Health Festival", presented by the Lawrence Hall of Science, at Lafayette Elementary School. Through engaging interactive activities and graphic visual aids, students learned about the fascinating workings of the human body.
       The goal of the event was to complement the curricular focus on good nutrition adopted by the school this year, by engendering an understanding of how a healthy human body operates.
        Intrigued students waited their turn to take apart models of the human torso, organ by organ, and then put them back together. At a related table, students traced two-dimensional replicas of internal organs onto construction paper, then cut out the drawings, and taped them to their shirts. Many students sported complete sets.
        The skeletal system was explored with both a tactile model and a screen to view X-rays. The students could compare a broken bone to an uninjured one. Another model gave students a chance to see all of the layers in a cross section of skin, while also learning about skin temperature.
        Among several brain challenger activities, including some that tested memory, reaction time, and coordination, was a problem-solving puzzle where the solution turned out to be much simpler than it seemed. "The youngest of the participants seemed to have the easiest time solving the puzzle, while older students and adults seemed to complicate the activity by over thinking it," LASF volunteer Rae Fixler observed. Fixler and Carol Escajeda recruited and organized the 20 volunteer parents who were available to work with the Lawrence Hall of Science monitors and festival visitors.
        A complete model of the human eye and each of its parts could be investigated, along with experiments that demonstrated the eye's blind spot, and how different color filters can affect color vision. Visitors could even view cellular structures within their own eyes through a small light and mirror magnifier.
        Balance boards were used to demonstrate how the inner ear controls the sense of balance. The experiment went further to show how adding a heavy backpack while balancing would immediately change the center of gravity and alter the sense of balance.
        Clearly proving how diet can affect blood flow, the Heart Station presented students with a model that allowed comparison of a normal sized artery to one mostly clogged by fat. Students learned how much harder the heart has to work in order to pump blood through arteries clogged by cholesterol, as well as other common problems associated with diet and heart disease.
        The issue of smoking and its effect on the body was emphasized with a very active demonstration of restricted lung capacity. Students learned about the difficulty of breathing with lungs polluted by cigarette smoke, as they first breathed through a straw while sitting, and then tried the same thing while running in place. Real lung tissue samples were on view, in order to compare a clean lung to one overwhelmed by cigarette smoke.
        At the LASF table, students could view hair, onion skin, and pennies projected onto a television screen via a camera connected to a compound microscope. Operated by science instructor Cindy Towle Kephart, different types of hair were compared at a magnification of 100 times their actual size. Parents and children alike enjoyed getting a hands-on experience with indestructible student microscopes by studying samples at 20 times magnification.
        Lafayette planning commissioner Karen Maggio, a nutrition instructor for Diablo Valley College's culinary arts program, took this opportunity to remind the children about the importance of a healthy diet. A nearby nutrition station gave students an opportunity to color a food pyramid and take home charts to track their daily diets, basic instructions for planning a vegetable and fruit garden, and guides to reading and understanding nutrition labels on packaged foods. Also available were lesson guides for a full unit on nutrition, including information charts, complete lesson plan outlines, recipes, and attention grabbing activities for students.
        The many volunteers from Lafayette's abundant resource of interested and involved parents helped to make the evening a great success.

11/01 Reprinted with permission. Visit the Contra Costa Times on the web at www.contracostatimes.com.

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