RELEASED: April 30, 2009

DANVILLE, KY—"Brains, Blood, and Bones: The Human Machine" was the theme for this year's LIFT (Learning Is Fun Together) program, an educational enrichment undertaking for 4th and 5th graders in the Danville/Boyle County community. The LIFT program is created by, hosted and facilitated by Centre elementary education majors.

Juniors Jessica Moreman, Leslie Meadows, Jacob Nicholas, Nick Edwards and Emily Barber met with the youngsters for two hours a week for six weeks, involving them in fun learning activities they had devised.

"The students learned about the different systems in the body – nervous, skeletal, muscular, digestive, cardiovascular and respiratory," says Moreman, an Elizabethtown, Ky., native.

And as the name of the program implies, activities were designed to make learning fun.

"The students made model lungs out of 2-liter bottles, a balloon and a straw; measured their lung capacity; and found their heart beat on their wrist using a toothpick with a ball of clay on the end," Moreman explains.

During the six-week course of LIFT, students learned about voluntary and involuntary reactions, read a play about the pathway of food through the digestive system and learned about the structure and functions of the human body and body systems. A highlight was a "human body scavenger hunt" in which students worked in groups to answer questions about the human body and gather all of the pictures of body parts needed to make a human body on a large piece of paper.

"LIFT this year was a very enjoyable experience for all and was overall very successful for the five of us as well as for the children," Moreman adds.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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