Kent City — As they snacked on Oreos and Cheez-Its, junior Brooklin Armstrong pulled up a photo on her computer to show second-grader Kayson Hickman-Kasinger.
“See this? This is your small intestine,” Brooklin said as Kayson’s eyes widened.
“Oh my goodness, bro!” Kayson exclaimed. “This is going to be kind of a hard one to draw!”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of squiggly lines because it gets all squished up in your body,” Brooklin said. “Your intestines also take a lot of the water that you ingest and put it back into your body, so that’s how you keep retaining water.”
Kayson considered this information as he leaned in to examine the image of the small intestine.
“This looks like the hardest thing I’ve ever tried (to draw) — but I got this, though,” he said.
“You do,” Brooklin affirmed. “You’re a really good drawer, so I know you can do it.”
‘I didn’t know that the rectum pushes your poop, but now I’m going to remember it forever.’
— second-grader Kayson Hickman-Kasinger
Creating Kid-Friendly Books
Students in Kent City High School’s Anatomy class recently teamed up with Kent City Elementary second-graders to create children’s books about the digestive system. After studying the way each organ functions and how the digestive system supports other functions of the body, the high-schoolers used their newfound knowledge to write kid-friendly narratives.
For illustrations, the class invited teacher Monica Moore’s second-graders to visit KCHS and contribute their artistic skills. Page by page, the Anatomy students taught the second-graders about the organs they were drawing and how the digestive system functions.
“Sometimes you don’t really, truly understand something unless you can break it down to a very simplistic level,” Anatomy teacher Tiffany Wojtas said. “As they do that for the second-graders, I think they learn it to a better degree. As they walk through each page, they’re explaining how these organs work and what they want (the second-graders) to do for their pictures.”
Upon completion, the books are printed in color and given to Moore, who keeps them in her classroom library for future students to read and enjoy.
“I let (my students) go in blind so that they can learn everything they need to know from the high-school students,” Moore said. “We talk about what they learned later on, and some of the tidbits they pick up on are pretty funny. But they just love getting to be illustrators, and the fact that they get to work with high-schoolers — they just think it’s the coolest thing.”
Teaching to Learn
Kayson was paired with Brooklin and her writing partner, junior Brooklyn Verburg, to illustrate their book. One of the first things he learned was that an adult mouth contains 32 teeth, a fact he’s planning to remember since the National Football League has 32 teams, he said.
He also didn’t realize that the body contained two intestines — one large and one small — so he made the bold, creative decision to color the large intestine green so that it looked different (and also because it’s his mom’s favorite color).
Before the visit was over, Kayson worked on drawing a liver, rectum and stomach for Brooklin and Brooklyn’s book.
“I think I’m a pretty good artist, but I never knew that there were two intestines, but even though those were hard I think I can always take a challenge,” Kayson said. “And I didn’t know that the rectum pushes your poop, but now I’m going to remember it forever. I worked really hard on all of this.”
Brooklin said the writing and teaching process helped clarify what they had learned in Anatomy class.
“There’s a lot more details than you’d realize that go through the digestive system — like how your body retains nutrients and water and everything that you need,” she said.
She’s excited to see the end result when their book is completed, thanks primarily to Kayson’s “fantastic artwork” and partnership.
“He’s a very, very good conversationalist,” she said of the second-grader. “I haven’t been bored once.”
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