More Harry Potter - Human Body connections

In addition to the usual multiple chapters of Harry Potter, we explored the Human Body some more today and found more connections between that and what we'd been reading.

A while back we took the girls' pulses before and after running up and down the stairs and talked about heart rates.  Today we finally got around to taking this one step further and took their pulse a couple more times afterwards, having run up and down two flights of stairs three times.  We discovered that their heart rates return to their pre-exercise rate an awful lot quicker than mine, when I did the same.  The plan is to make a graph of the results tomorrow.

Having done this I read some of the section about the heart from our Human Body - a children's encyclopedia, while they were having their tea and it was then that the girls and I both learned something new, that linked Harry Potter and the human body.  For the girls it was that the word 'atrium' has an architectural meaning (there's one in the Ministry of Magic) and an anatomical one.  For me, it's that 'heart strings' (some wands have a dragon heart string core) aren't just a figure of speech, but we do actually have heart strings.

In other news, M has been box modelling today, making a house out of the box our new toaster came in, I'm not sure if it's finished yet, but I do know that it does have a loo.  K has been working on a crafty project that she's doing that she found in an Usborne book.

Finally, an interesting conversation we had in the car on the way to korfball.  We give a lift to a schooly friend, A, who is the same age as K and the conversation came around to ages within school years.  A commented that it was a bit strange that the oldest and youngest girls in her class are best friends because of the nearly 12 month age gap.  M immediately commented that she's good friends with a 16 year old, also called M and we talked about how with HE groups there's much more mixing between ages and that school is a rather artificial environment in this way.  M also pointed out that she, M, is friends with A's mum too.  I find it really interesting that HE children, not only have a much wider range of friends in terms of ages, but also consider adults friends too, in a way that schooled children rarely do.