Bead Relay: Modeling Blood Flow Through the Heart, Lungs, and Body

Lesson Plan · Grade 7 · Science · ngss

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Grade

Name: Engage
Minutes: 8
Purpose: Hook 7th graders with a phenomenon they can feel in their own bodies, a heart rate and breathing rate that jump after brief exercise. This surfaces their initial ideas about why the heart, lungs, and muscles all speed up together. It creates the driving question that the Explore bead relay will model: how do oxygen and nutrients get to working muscle cells, and where does the carbon dioxide go? The phase lays groundwork for the objective of describing circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and muscular systems as interacting subsystems without front-loading vocabulary. Method note: (a) This one-period slice covers Engage, Explore, and Explain. (b) It is Day 1 of a 3-day 5E arc on body systems (MS-LS1-3). (c) No phases precede it. Elaborate (Day 2, extending the model to exercise and disease scenarios such as a blocked artery or high altitude) and Evaluate (Day 3, an individual model-revision task and a CER on system interactions) follow it.
Materials

Q1. Trace the path of one 'blood' student from the lung back to the lung. What did they pick up and drop off at each stop?
Q2. Why does the muscle need BOTH oxygen and energy beads? What would happen if blood stopped flowing to it?
Q3. Name one way our bead model is different from the real body.

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