Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great winter break! I wanted to ease everyone back into school routines today, so we didn’t dive right into new content. Instead, we started with our usual weekend check-in, but went a longer on account of all the time off. It was great to hear about all the different activities students were up to over the vacation.

Once the weekend check-in was done, we spent some much-needed time reviewing just what we covered prior to break. Students have a habit of forgetting some things after being gone for two weeks. With the help of our warm-up and student volunteers, we summarized the few weeks leading up to break.

This left us just enough time to dip our toes into something new. Prior to the break, we were tracking food molecules through the digestive system. We saw graphs of those food molecules as they moved through the small intestine. These graphs are what told us that M’Kenna’s body was having trouble absorbing nutrients, specifically carbohydrates. This led to a natural question: where are the food molecules that are absorbed going?

Using what we know about cells and other body systems, students worked in their table groups to reason out that those nutrients enter our blood, and are then transported throughout the body. Tomorrow, we’ll be looking at absorption throughout the entire digestive system.