Nervous system

When it came time to tackle the nervous system, I decided we needed to be as hands-on as possible, working with models to help students understand what was going on in this complex system.  I chose three activities for us to do.  We did Pom-Pom Potential from http://teach.genetics.utah.edu/, then we did the Nerve Cell Communication activity from the Life Science Learning Center of the University of Rochester. (It's easy to request the link to be able to access their library of activities.) We finished up with a fun reflexes and reactions lab.

Doing the activities in this order brought us from micro to macro, but I think next year I'll reverse it and go macro to micro so students can go from what they can identify with (reflexes and nerve cell endings) to the more abstract of action potentials.

We had some good discussions about the membrane potential graph of a nerve impulse that was in the question sheet I made to go with Pom-Pom Potential. I would have liked to spend more time talking about the "macro" part of the nervous system of the nerve impulses traveling through the body and the benefits of reflex arcs. Hopefully each year I will tweak this to be better than the year before.

PS-One of my students was "babysitting" for a Junior health student during this activity--thus the doll in the corner of the pom-pom picture.