Read

When you eat, food goes on a long journey through a tube in your body: the mouth, the food pipe, the stomach, the small intestine and the large intestine.

It starts in your mouth. Your teeth chew food into small pieces. Your spit makes it wet and starts to break down the starch in foods like bread.

When you swallow, muscles squeeze the food down the food pipe into your stomach.

Your stomach makes strong acid and juices that break food down. A thick slimy layer protects the stomach itself.

Experiment: Stomach in a bag

1. Break the crackers into the bag. This is like your teeth chewing.
2. Pour in the water (your spit and stomach juices). Close the bag tightly.
3. Squish the bag with your hands for one minute. This is your stomach mixing the food. What does it look like now?
4. Over the bowl, an adult cuts a small corner off the bag and the mush is squeezed into the tights leg. Squeeze it along slowly, like muscles squeezing food through the intestines.
5. Look and feel: what comes through the tights? What is left inside? Wash your hands.

	What does the food look like?
Before	What will the crackers look like after squishing?
After squishing	What will the crackers look like after squishing?
After squeezing through the tights	What will the crackers look like after squishing?

Questions

1. Draw the journey of a piece of apple from your mouth to your large intestine. Label the parts.

   🍎

2. What do your teeth do?

3. After squishing, the crackers were in big pieces / a mush.

   big pieces / a mush

4. Where does the goodness from food go into your blood?

Sources for every fact on this sheet: echoesof.science/school/digestion/sources/

🖨 Print this sheet ← back to the lesson