Digestive System for Kids

The Steps of the Digestive System for Kids to Learn

Digestion is a complicated process. The food you swallow and eat goes through a series of complicated chemical reactions. While the order of steps is logical (from mouth to stomach to the intestines, etc.), remember what happens at each step can be tricky.

It All Starts in the Mouth

Before you even take that first bite, you smell that delicious food and your brain starts to realize that it’s in for a tasty treat. You salivate, but that salivation serves an important part of the digestion process. Within the saliva, there contains enough enzymes to break down the food you’re chewing. It helps make it mushy and easier to swallow, but it doesn’t just go from your mouth into your stomach. . .

The Esophagus

The esophagus is a big stretchy pipe that moves food from the back of your throat to your stomach. It actually has muscles that move the food down into your stomach. The actions of moving the food down is called parastalsis, consequently vomiting is called reverse parastalsis. (That’s when the muscles move in the opposite direction in which they normally move pushing the food out of your mouth.)

The Stomach Is the Mixer

The stomach’s primary function in the digestive process is to release enzymes into the food and further break it down into a liquidy mixture. Then it slowly releases that liquid mixture into the small intestines. The stomach uses the assistance of its own gastric juices. Among other things--these gastric juices also help kill bacteria that you may have eaten.

The 22 Foot Long ‘Small’ Intestine

Twenty-two feet certainly doesn’t seem small, but that’s about how long an adult small intestine would be if you stretched it out. With the help of the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas, the small intestine helps extract the vitamins and minerals from our food so that they can become useful for our bodies.

The Large Intestine

The parts of the food that your body eats that it can’t use get passed through the large intestine where they are separated into liquids and solids. The liquid becomes urine, and the solids become feces. So essentially, your digestive system ends its work with a flush!

Resources for Teaching the Digestive System for Kids

The human body is one of the first things that is taught in elementary school. There are numerous resources available to use in teaching the human body. Here are a few top picks for books, DVDs and websites.

Books that Teach About the Digestive System

• Guts: Our Digestive System--This is one of the better picture books on the digestive system.

• Your Digestive System (How Your Body Works)--An easy to read explanation for those students who can read on their own.

• The Digestive System (The Invisible World--This is a great resource for children and the adults that are teaching them.

• The Quest to Digest is a humorous look at what happens to the food we eat.

DVDs for Teaching the Digestive System

• The Standard Deviants School Human Nutrition Part 2 The Digestive System--This video is the classroom addition but will teach tweens and teens the ins and outs of the digestive system.

• The Magic School Bus: The Human Body Follow Ms. Frizzle and the class as they tour the human body.

Resources on the Web for Teaching the Digestive System

• Kids Health.org does an excellent job of presenting the basics of the digestive system in a way that kids can understand.

• The Food Factory is an excellent picture of the digestive system with clearly labeled parts.

• Your Gross and Cool Body gives a somewhat interactive picture of what happens to food in your digestive system.

• An Interactive Digestive System allows you to put the insides of your body together, watch the path food takes and gives some good information on the basics of the digestive system.