Exploring The Skeletal System

This term in 11PE we have started our 'Move That Body' unit, exploring anatomy, biomechanics and exercise physiology. I really enjoy teaching these topics because I find the body so fascinating! We have just finished learning about the skeletal system, and have started to explore the musculoskeletal system. 

I have tried to be creative with the activities we do, to ensure students are confident with the names of the bones (and eventually muscles). We have played Simon Says, played Anatomy Arcade (Whack-A-Bone and Poke-A-Muscle) and students created their own skeletons and labelled them. For this task, students were given free access to the store room and asked to create a skeleton and then label the bones on Google Drawing. 

Please see three examples of student blogs sharing their skeletal systems: Autymn, Kori-Lee and Tyler.

As one of my goals this year is to increase my use of technology into my teaching, and recently I reflected the need to have more tech in PE, I have been looking around for some ideas. Anatomy particularly lends itself to some interactive websites including BioDigital. The students were given about 20 minutes to look around the body in the 3D human body and were incredibly engaged. As I did, the students were amazed how they could zoom inside the body, and take away/add different layers of the body. Biodigital allows the viewer to explore more than the muscles or the bones, which are the greatest focus in our units. I wish I had more time to explore other parts of the body, particularly the nervous system.

Virtual/Augmented Realities are becoming bigger in education, so I would like to try and become more familiar and confident with them, so I can include into my teaching. Last year Ashley explored Anatomy 4D and I also played with Google Expeditions at the GAFE conference in the holidays, both great VR tools. PE Geek also blogged about Anatomy 4D, encouraging me to include this interesting tool into my 11PE class for further revision, and an extension of learning. I am also looking forward to including a Google Expedition of what happens to the lungs from smoking cigarettes into my Exploring Substances unit in 10Health.