Art and anatomy project.

There are many ways Art and Science can work together at school, and this is one of our experiments. Second year pupils at Collegio Villoresi were given the task of representing the lungs, one of the hardest-working organs in the body. They expand and contract up to 20 times a minute to supply oxygen to be distributed to tissue all over the body and expel carbon dioxide that has been created throughout the body. But what do they look like? How can we represent them visually with other materials?

We decided to create 3d models of the lungs with the following materials:

• foam kitchen cloth
• coloured modelling clay (red, blue, yellow, white)
• toothpicks (for the labelling system)
• cardboard and white paper

Everybody had seen pictures of the respiratory system, and talked about them in Science lessons, and now our task was to make them!

We cut out display board from cardboard and began to build the model lungs by cutting our the right and left lungs from foam cloth and then modelling the trachea, pharynx, bronchioles and alveoli with coloured clay. Finally the pupils labelled the model, ready for display.

An excellent job by all the 2nd year Middle School pupils.