Summer SAVY, Session 4 Day 4, Neurobiology of Learning (7th – 8th)
Hello SAVY Families!
Happy Thursday! I can’t believe how quickly this week has been going by! We certainly have been keeping busy. Today, we wrapped up our poster projects on the different parts of the brain, and we had a poster walk around the room to learn about the parts of the brain. I was so impressed with everyone’s creativity! We then dove into the neuroscience of the 5 senses. We talked about how the students see the material I am teaching them and how they listen, feel, taste, and smell as well. We had little demonstrations for each sense, including smelling candles, tasting snacks, looking at optical illusions, and testing our two-point discrimination in different parts of the bodies. The two-point discrimination reflects how many (or in some cases, how few) sensory neurons are in certain areas of our bodies to transmit sensory information to the brain.
In the afternoon we heard from our last guest speaker, Dr. Meredyth Wegener. Dr. Wegener is a lecturer in the neuroscience department, so she provided a different perspective from the two psychologists we heard from earlier in the week. The students asked some wonderful questions and showed off their knowledge of the course content from the week. We even got to do a little activity where the students got to understand that scientific research is unknown and that we can’t verify with anything other than checking the work of others and asking important questions.
Some ideas to ask your students about:
- How are our brains working to see right now? How about hear? Eat?
- Do we have a sixth sense?
- What parts of the body are more sensitive to touch than others? Why is that?
- What kinds of information did you get from the mystery box activity? How do you think this is similar to doing science?
Looking forward to wrapping everything up tomorrow and closing the week out strong!
Laurel Bellocchio