Toby’s Lunch Journey

Toby is making a poster about lunch. He draws a sandwich inside a person’s tummy and stops. “Does it just stay there until we need energy?” he asks Ms Green. She suggests following the food’s journey. His first picture has missed several important stops along the way.

They begin with a teaching model of teeth. Front teeth can bite and cut; broad back teeth help crush and grind. Chewing breaks food into smaller pieces. Saliva moistens it and begins breaking down some starch. Digestion has already started before food reaches the stomach.

When someone swallows, food moves down the oesophagus, the food pipe, towards the stomach. Muscles move it along; it does not simply drop through a hollow body. Toby places a food-pipe picture between his mouth and stomach cards. He checks the order against a reliable classroom diagram.

The stomach holds food while muscular walls mix it with digestive juices. Ms Green squeezes a soft pouch to model mixing. The pouch is not a working stomach and cannot show every chemical change. Toby adds a note to remember that digestion involves more than squashing food.

Next comes the small intestine. Digestion continues here. Many nutrients from the food pass through its wall into the blood, which carries them around the body. Ms Green stretches out a long soft tube model. “Small means narrow,” she explains. “It is not a short little pocket.”

The remaining material moves into the large intestine, where more water is absorbed. Waste that the body does not use eventually leaves as faeces. “So the body takes in what it can use and gets rid of the waste,” Toby says.

He looks back at his first sandwich picture. It suggested that a whole lunch waited in one place. Now his sequence shows movement and change. The models helped him think, but he checks their limits. A cloth pouch cannot make digestive juices, and paper cards do not absorb nutrients.

Toby shares the completed poster with his class. “My lunch takes a journey,” he says. He points from mouth to food pipe, stomach and intestines. Ms Green asks what surprised him most. “Digestion starts before the tummy,” he replies. His sandwich drawing finally has a story to tell.