Checking the Blood & Heart Pressure

Recently Ashley and I decided to play around with a stethoscope and blood pressure readings. At first we tried to do it the old fashion way, but Ashley couldn't figure it out. I was the one being tested so we kept joking that the darn thing didn't work 'cause I didn't have a heartbeat! (Ha Ha!) It was difficult for Ashley to pump the air through, and that's mainly because there was a hole in ours. Ashley attempted it multiple times just to see if we'd get the hang of it, but we didn't, so no heartbeat was heard. So then we moved on to the blood pressure monitor. Once again we had trouble working it, but then after Ashley came up with an amazing idea to bring it up to 160 instead of 120, it worked. When we did it I had to to get up to 160 just to get my reading, but Ashley only had to at 120. The monitor got hers right away while mine took a little extra umph! (Just my luck) Anyways, we learned about the lub and dub of the heart. The first beat of it is the lub, while the second is the dub, thus explaining why the heart is Lub Dub :) It was really difficult to find the heartbeat every time we tried, but it was a learning experience, and it was pretty neat to learn how to do it.

 

Play Doh of the Ear

For a presentation we had to do in class we decided to teach everyone about the ear. We created a presentation as well as a structure of the inner and outer ear. The one pictured above is the one we made out of play doh! It's pretty awesome! :) Below is the link to the presentation Ashley and I did. Hope you enjoy! :)

http://www.formatpixel.com/go/en/users_view_info.php?id=22294

Heart Dissection

So a week ago for class we dissected a Sheep's heart. While our other classmates were off with their Pig and cow heart, we were stuck with our little, sheep's heart (a-ha!) As you could see from above the other hearts were about 3X bigger than my partner Ashley and my. Even though our heart wasn't as big, and it  wasn't as clearly noticeable to find parts of the heart, we still did it. First we decided to cut the heart in half to get an internal view of the heart. It was really interesting to see all the parts of a real life heart. We were able to locate all the parts listed on a worksheet Mr. Lugwig gave us, and measure how big all the parts were. While others in the classroom were coming up with 3 inch parts, Ashley and I were lucky if we got over 1. It was kind of funny, but it just showed the difference in how the hearts were. And although they may have been different in size, it didn't make a difference in their function! :)