Digestion in Year 8

Since we returned to school, the Year 8 children have been learning about diet and digestion. They have been excited about what they have encountered in the course of the lessons. Although some children already knew the fundamentals of digestion, they were all excited to learn new facts, including that stomach acid is very powerful but is also one that cannot ‘burn’ us! We have learnt that our appendix is not really useful in a human body and can be removed without any major consequences.

For the end of the topic the children were challenged to create a digestive model and talk about what happens to a mouthful of food when it enters the mouth, passes through the digestive tract, until it comes out as waste.

As an alternative to this task, they were asked to write a creative story about what happened to a lowly beef burger when it was eaten by a hungry human being. Here is a sample - a diary entry about “Bob the Burger” - written by Aurora:

One day I was walking through the mysterious wood and I saw this portal. I, a burger with no brain, didn’t know what it was or where it went. I wandered over to the entrance where the magic would happen.

It sucked me in without hesitation and brought me to the ‘gateway’ of a mouth? I had not one clue what I was doing there and I tried to escape, but I couldn’t. The passage to the upcoming events opened wide. I got pushed forward and I landed face first on the humans wet, sloppy tongue. A liquid flushed me down the tight oesophagus, and into the liver.

The fizzy liquid didn’t ‘sit’ right in the human’s body or perhaps they just drank it too fast. They burped and acid came running up their oesophagus. A couple of minutes passed and I floated smoothly down into the stomach, then to the small intestine, next to the large. In the small intestine, some of my lettuce got stuck… oops!

I met ‘Harry the Hot’ in the stomach and he told me that I was going to get broken down but I didn’t believe him. Eventually, I got to the rectum and apparently, I was going to somewhere called the anus. This is apparently the opening end of the digestive system where the food leaves the body? That kind of sounded like a slide...weeee! Finally, I got to the anus, nobody told me that it would smell this bad ...off I went out of the human’s body and into the toilet bowl?? I didn’t see that coming…

Mr. Mulongo