Body systems brought to life
at district elementary school
VERONICA YANKOWSKI South River Elementary School third-grader Ryan Schweizer and teacher Jill Carlen decorate a classroom door like a mouth to aid in a lesson on the digestive system.
SOUTH RIVER — The intestines, the esophagus, and the mouth and teeth surround the third-grade students of Jill Carlen’s class at South River Elementary School.
Carlen’s classroom has been transformed into a larger-than-life representation of several body systems. On Friday, the third-graders and the first-grade classes of the Johnson Place school began a tour of the body systems, Carlen said.
According to Carlen, the third-graders will take the first-graders to nine different stations to learn a variety of lessons involving in part the five senses, bones and muscles, and nutrition. They will also learn about the heart, lungs, the stomach, the liver and kidneys, Carlen said. The students will tour the stations and the life-like renditions of the body systems with their parents, she said.
"This is out of the box," Principal Wayne Sherman said.
Carlen, who is new to the South River Elementary School this school year, is in her first full year of teaching, he said.
The project is approximately two weeks long. Previously, the students researched information and made posters and booklets for the stations, she said. The re-creation of the body systems had been under way before Christmas, she said.
— Jennifer Dome