A basic way to understand anything is to learn how it is built. Kids can build a brain model by using modeling clay. Each portion of the brain can be shaped in different-colored clay, resulting in a rainbow of sections. Once the model is complete, be sure to have them label as many parts as is appropriate for their age group. Younger children can use more basic terminology: hearing, seeing, thinking, moving and remembering. For older kids, more complex and accurate labels are appropriate: frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe and occipital lobe. As an added challenge, you can have them identify brain geography in more detail: optic nerve, hypothalamus, pituitary gland, medulla, cerebellum, corpus callosum, motor cortex and basal ganglia.
To understand how the brain sends messages to the rest of the body, kids can play a game called Synaptic Tag. One half of the field or court is the axon; directly across is the dendrite. The space between represents the gap neurotransmitters must jump to reach the dendrite. Most kids begin as neurotransmitters in the axon, waiting to make their way to the dendrite. Two or three children are the enzymes in the middle that deactivate the neurotransmitters, causing them to return to the axon and try again. The object of them game is for the neurotransmitters to make it all the way to the dendrite.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres -- right and left -- and each side has specific jobs to do. For example, 90 percent of humans are right-handed, which means they use their right hand to do things such as write or eat. Kids can experiment with this by polling a set number of people which hand they use most and then calculating how close their data matches that of the world population. If their results show, for example, a higher percentage of left-handed individuals than 10 percent, they could hypothesize possible reasons for this. In addition, kids could expand their research and test left/right side dominance by determining foot, eye or ear preference.
The human brain has the ability to recall tremendous amounts of information, but this requires effort and processing time. Here is an experiment that can be done in a classroom to test short-term memory. To start, have 10 students stand at the front of the room in a line facing the remaining students. Ask one student who is not in the line to leave the room. Have one of the students from the line return to his or her seat. Now ask the student who left the room to come in and identify who is no longer in the line. This experiment can be varied in terms of the number students in the line and how long it takes to come up with an answer.