These websites explore biology related facts of the Human Body. They are for a variety of ages and grade levels.
This website is a great tool for many biology related topics. It includes human and animal biology which makes for a large arrangement of information. What I like the most about the website is that it is easy to navigate with simple and neat links on the left hand side. This quality makes for a great resource to have for young students who may more may not be familiar with website usage
Aside from navigation, the website has many other kid friendly features such as bright colors, large fonts, and plenty of pictures. This creates a colorful and friendly atmosphere in which learning is encouraged instead of being alienated by large chunks of information and lack-luster presentation. Therefore, students will feel comfortable navigating the websites and searching through the links on their own.
The human body aspect of the website is under the “human biology” link on the left hand side. Once you are on the page, a picture of a young boy laid out is shown. A list of body systems are on the left side of the boy; muscles, bones, digestive, circulatory, respiratory, excretory, endocrine, and nervous. When you hover your mouse of over one of these systems, the picture is changed to give a visual of that system. For example, when you hover over the “muscles” link the young boys muscles are exposed. This is a great way for students to check their comprehension of the system they would like to explore.
When you click on one of the systems (muscles, bones, digestive, circulatory, respiratory, excretory, endocrine, or nervous) you are taken to a page describing the specific jobs they explore. Most importantly, this explanations come with pictures which aid the learning process by giving a visual of what is being explained. This is great for Second Language Learners who may not know the English terms associated with system groups.
By clicking the “next” button, there is more information given about the topics. When the information is finished it brings you back to the page that has the rest of the systems so the student can explore more of the human body without having to figure out how to get back to that page.
The aspects that I think best helps with Second language learners include the hover-over body systems which show pictures before you can click on the link. This allows for students to see what the body function is that way, if they know what it is in Spanish, they can figure out the English term. Secondly, the many pictures would aid second language learners because pictures are universal and sometimes seeing a picture is just as much as helpful as reading words.
(Evaluated by: Jennifer Ramos)
“Bam! Body and Mind”, is a wonderful website that provides accurate and factual information about the human body while making it interesting and eye catching to English speaking children as well as second language learners. The top of the home screen has six different categories, which include diseases, nutrition and food, physical activity, your safety, your life, and your body. Each section provides factual information, which would usually be boring to children, but shows it in a way that appeals to their interests. For example, under the diseases category there is a comic book that you can flip through that portrays diseases as evil villains and your immune system as super heroes. So by putting information like this in a fun and relatable form, it can be extremely effective in engaging children. Each category provides links to games, interactive tools, and links to messages from an “Xpert” on the human body and what affects it. The color scheme of the entire website is extremely bright and cheerful and has friendly children characters throughout all of the different pages. The only obvious downside that I could see in this website was that it is mainly targeted at older children. Younger children can definitely still use the website but they will need some extra assistance for the types of games that are shown and knowing how to navigate the site. It can also be a little bit overwhelming because it provides a large amount of information, but overall this website is a wonderful resource for kids to learn many different things about the body and also things that they can do to help their own bodies.
For second language learners, this is a wonderful website that will allow them to explore and learn without necessarily having to understand all of the written words. The visual aids that are provided are a perfect teaching tool for teachers to use either in their actual classrooms or as a fun homework assignment. Personally, I would provide a worksheet for the children so that exploring this website would become a scavenger hunt and they would have to search through the different categories and find certain information or play certain games. This would definitely be something that would engage children and for second language learners there are enough visual aids and spoken sound effects, that it would be very helpful. Also, the information provided is always related back to children’s actual lives so I think second language learners may find the relate- ability very beneficial to their learning. Overall this website is not really designed with second language learners in mind, but I think that the way it has been constructed can help emphasize the content information about the human body to any child.
(Evaluated by: Amy Sand)
Science Kids is a site that provides information on about 30 various science topics (such as biology, weather, etc.) from which you can choose. Since our topic was the human body, I followed the human body topic button. The site itself provides games, experiments, quizzes, images, facts, project ideas (pertaining to the human body), and videos for students to explore. I checked out the various areas the site supplies, beginning with the games section. They offer four games pertaining to human body: Health and Growth, Teeth and Eating, Heart Rate Exercises, and Skeletons and Bones. Each game provides a cute animation that is fun and entertaining for children. The teeth and eating asks you to place the correct teeth with the correct being (human, tiger, sheep, duck are some), while the Health and Growth requires you to keep water, food, exercise and sleep levels up as an animated child goes through his day. The games are short, but informational on the subjects they cover and I think kids would like to play those instead of being told directly what the body requires or how our heart rate works when we do various activities. The images provided show certain parts of the body (the brain, the heart, etc.) and are clearly labeled which I think is good for students to look at when they’re learning about those various parts of the body. The site’s videos are kind of old and could be confusing to the younger viewer, but I think the way they visualize certain topics (such as the circulation and how the ear works videos). Combined, the videos and images could provide a good resource to the students. The quizzes provided (a short answer and a word scramble) are kind of wordy and I didn’t think the way they were worded was a particularly good way of communicating to students, but they are there if need be. I just personally would maybe steer clear of that portion of the site. They also have fun facts, which could be useful, but they are sometimes quite wordy and not listed in a very fun way, so that may just be a teacher-only resource. Lastly, the experiments seemed really cool and like a good thing to do with students in the classroom, such as making a model hand (to go over how muscles work), and making (fake) snot (as a way to learn why it is important to our body).
For these activities, I would maybe use the games during a computer lab time to ensure they utilize the entirety of the game, since the games can end up being quite short if you don’t properly follow the directions. The videos and images could be helpful if explaining a concept to the class and you need an accurate visual representation, but the videos are kind of old, so maybe finding an updated version would be nice. Since the site gives a long list of research questions pertaining to the human body for project ideas, maybe as a class activity, a teacher could direct the students to this portion of the site and tell them to pick out the question that intrigued them the most. Then maybe somehow make it to where throughout the year, the class works together to research and answer the questions. As for a multi-literacy classroom, I don’t think this site is very applicable. It only had information in English and within the videos and facts and such, there were often words used that only fluent English language users could maybe know. It’s too complex for English Language Learners and I think it is up to the teacher’s discretion on deciding whether or not it would be appropriate to use the site if they had any ELL students in their class. Since some of the information is complex on the site, I would suggest that it maybe be used in older classrooms, like third grade and up. Some of the information is simplified like the skeleton and bones game, but I think in order to get some of the more difficult subjects (such as how the ear works video), the students need to be a little bit more advanced in their learning. Overall, I think the site is pretty good. It could use some updating, but it does what it needs to in order to educate children in a fun and entertaining way.
(Evaluated by: Anne Pugh)
This website is called Surfing the Human Body and includes tabs that describe individual organs and their function as well as a "tour" that the child can participate in that goes through the human body and highlights the main functions of the various organs. Each page contains a picture of the organ as well as a basic description of shape, location, and function. The site includes quizzes and games as well for the students after studying the various pages.
This website is very text-based and would definitely be geared more towards older students with fairly high English literacy. The material is organized in a simple manner and is divided into sections that enable the students learning about topic to have a very focused and concise resource. The graphics are simple and are labeled with the key words that a child should have pulled from the describing text about the particular body parts. The actual text of the website is beneficial to ELLs because it utilizes repetition of the key organ in nearly every sentence. The language is academic but fairly basic and would be a useful resource to use for a research project on the human body. The "interactive tour" section of the website takes the student through the various systems and body parts and is helpful to ELLs in that the information is divided into very short paragraphs that are direct and to the point. The student can easily navigate the website and find basic information without being weighed down by large amounts of text.
The idea of "surfing the human body" makes the information a bit more fun and kid-friendly. For in-class use , this website could enable research to be done outside of complicated textbooks. Worksheets could be made using the information in a fill-in-the blank format that enables students to use the academic language that is repeated throughout the website pages. While very kid-friendly and full of useful information, the website is a bit lacking in the entertainment area. For classroom use, this website would be better serving as a go-to for information to fuel class activities rather that being an activity itself. The games that are on the site are extremely basic and would serve ELLs well because of their basic vocabulary and the use of graphics to help match the vocabulary words.
(evaluated by: Ashley Milliken)
www.anatomyarcade.com/
The website I found is called Anatomy Arcade and it has numerous activities for students who are learning about the human body and its functions. It breaks down the human body into different sections that most curriculums would have. The website has different areas that focus on specific parts of the body such as the heart and bones. Instead of doing worksheets that ask the students to label the body and etc., this is a great website to substitute that with or add into the lesson. It allows the students to enter into a new environment outside of worksheets and notes, and they are able to explore and learn on their own. I would use this website as practice for my students as we learn about the human body. This website could also be used as a pre activity before we dive into a lesson. I could direct them to a certain activity on the website about the circulatory system that helps them explore common vocabulary about it and they can also see what the body parts look like. For every section there is a crossword, word search, a jigsaw and then other games depending on the subject. I find the jigsaw puzzle to be the most difficult activity but it is fun and educational. After going through the other activities on the website, I think that this is a nice activity that puts together all of the student’s knowledge about the vocabulary and how the different human body parts of that section look like. A limitation may be that the students may become so caught up in the games that they will not learn as much as they should. Because most of the learning is done through gaming that also makes the website and its activities more appealing to the students. So the websites strength is also its greatest weakness. The website would be best suited for middle and high school students because of the vocabulary that used and it would be hard for elementary kids to figure out how to play some of the games as well. The website would be very applicable in a classroom setting because it would allow students to discover things on their own as well as find out what is interesting to them about a certain area. By having the students explore before the teacher teaches, helps the students get an idea about what they are about to get into and they can also come into the lessons with questions and hopefully they will receive the answer through the lesson. For more advanced students, the website also has additional links about anatomy, if the students want to research more.
(Evaluated by: Yasmin McKnight)
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