Heart=Muscle
Timed for 60 seconds, students attempt to squeeze a foam heart 90 times to identify resting BPM for a school-age child. Further discussion questions guide students to deduce the heart is an involuntary muscle with one's pulse being a signal it's beating.
Alignment: Health & Fitness GLE 2.2.1

Circulation Simulation
With a 6X12 foot floor mat of the circulatory system, students travel the path of an oxygenated blood cell from the lungs, to the heart, out the body and back to expel carbon dioxide and re-oxygenate.
Alignment: Health & Fitness GLE 2.2.1

Lard Lesson
Students match bags of lard/fat with meals either by guessing and checking or adding up fat grams on nutrition labels.
Alignment: Health & Fitness 2.2.1

Sticky Blood
Given a little water, Dixie cup, stir-straw and a Tablespoon of powdered sugar, students compare and contrast the consistency of water vs. water when a tablespoon of powdered sugar is added. Students further discuss the different amounts of power needed to suck both through the straw. The mixture is analogous to atherosclerosis. The thicker mixture and greater power needed relates to how much harder the heart has to work to pump blood through a narrowed artery. Back around the 6x12 foot floor mat of the circulatory system, a procedure called angioplasty (to widen an artery narrowed with plaque) is compared to a slinky positioned over an artery with a long balloon blown up inside it.
Alignment: Health & Fitness GLE 1.5.1, 2.3.2