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Bishop Creighton Academy

Disgusting Digestion!

The Tigers have been getting really messy today, learning all about how their digestive system works!

Food plays a really important role in our bodies. It keeps us fit and healthy, as well as providing all of the energy we need to get through the day. But where does it all go? Today, the year 4 Tigers made their own digestive system with a plastic bag stomach and a pair of tights for their intestines. It was fantastically disgusting!

It It all starts off in the mouth. Our teeth are specially designed to take our food and break it apart into small pieces. Canines rip and tear meat while our molars work to grind our food down to a paste. Here, the food also mixes with saliva to form a mushy paste which is easy to swallow.

Crunching and smashing our food in the "mouth"
Crunching and smashing our food in the "mouth"

When our food is in small enough pieces, we swallow and our food travels down, through our oesophagus and into the stomach. Here, it is mixed with a strong acid and churned and squeezed until it is unrecognisable from the food we started with.

Adding stomach acid to our food and squeezing!

Lastly, our food travels through meters and meters of our intestines. Here, food is squeezed and constricted even more which forces nutrients and water out through the sides of the intestine. After a long journey, the food we ate in the first place has now totally changed. We're now left with all the parts of the food which cannot be digested and absorbed. This waste product continues to be squeezed through the system until it inevitably reaches the other end...

Squeezing our food through the intestines until the inevitable...

More pictures of our experiment can be found in our photo galley, reccomended for those with a strong stomach!