A Muscular System Lesson Plan To get Your Students Moving

A Muscular System Lesson Plan To get Your Students Moving
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The Muscular System

Before beginning this particular human body lesson plan, make sure to complete the prior lesson plans in this series that focus on the skin and the skeletal systems. This muscular system lesson plan will serve as an addition to the project that the students are putting together. Once those lessons are complete, read the following information to the students. This information provides some basics about the muscular system, including some fun facts to entertain the students and teachers alike!

The muscular system is responsible for movement in the body, whether it is voluntary or involuntary. Consider your reflexes. When someone taps you on the knee, the leg jumps without you thinking about it. These are involuntary movements. Voluntary movements include things like walking and talking.

  • There are over 30 muscles in the human hand.
  • Your lips are red because the skin is so thin that you can see the muscles below it.
  • Muscles make up roughly one-third of a person’s body weight.
  • You get goosebumps when you’re cold because tiny muscles beneath the skin contract to close the pores on the skin and prevent some body heat from escaping. This causes the hair on your skin to stand up.
  • It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
  • The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body.

Once you review the information provided in this muscle lesson, move on to the activity presented in the next section.

Motor Skills

Instruct students that as we grow older, we develop more coordination using our fine motor skills and large motor skills. Ask them to think about small children. Babies learn to walk as they develop large motor skills. They may often seem clumsy as they are unable to manipulate small objects, but this is because their fine motor skills have not been completely developed yet. Practice really does make perfect as we will see in this activity. To complete this activity you will need a basketball, timer and a pen.

Ask students to take out a sheet of paper and write their name on the top of it. They will be recording the results of this activity to place in the time capsule that was started at the beginning of this series. Follow the instructions below to complete this activity with each student.

  1. Hand one student the basketball. Ask them to dribble it as many times as they can without losing the dribble. Count how many times the student dribbles the ball in one minute and record it on their paper.
  2. Hand the student a pen. Ask the student to hold the pen between their index finger and their middle finger. Ask the student to “roll” the pen through all their fingers and back again as many times as they can for one minute. Record how many times the student was able to roll the pen.
  3. Repeat for each student.

When the exercise is complete, inform students that this was a way of testing their fine motor skills as well as their large motor skills. The results are recorded so that they can compare them at the end of the year and see if there was any overall improvement in their development of motor skills. Once this muscular system lesson plan is complete, move on to the next lesson plan in this series.

For another cute lesson on the body systems, click here.

This post is part of the series: Back to School Science: Build a Time Capsule

This series was created so students could see the changes they go through in one school year. This is a fun back to school science lesson plan series that students and teachers alike will enjoy!

  1. Back to School Lesson: Track How Your Students Change Throughout the Year
  2. Measuring Growth in the Human Skeleton
  3. A Muscular System Lesson
  4. Measuring Human Growth and Development
  5. Measuring Lung Performance in Your Students