Anatomical model of the brain split into several parts.
Shows the different parts of the brain

Take care with age of kids! If they've never heard of nerves... take it easy.
If theyre the interested get them to ask you questions, its more fun for them...
DO NOT try and cover all of those or you'll only have the parents listening. If even them...

At the end get the kids to put it together again, amazingly they like it. When they get stuck ask them which bit does this? To see if they've remembered anything before telling them what bit they need to put in next.

This is the sort of things you could say/ might come up:

- Brain made up of nerves - what are nerves? E.g. say they're like telephone systems from the body to the brain and vice versa. (often they only mention pain etc so expand on that) Think about the spinal cord and what happens if it gets damaged. If youve used the tendon hammers remind them of that too.

- Cortex - really big, like newspaper scrunched up around an orange or something. Very big in humans. Bits to control movement, sensory, visual, Get them to guess where senses are on the cortex by relation to the sensing organ, obviously they will get visual wrong because they won't know that nerves go from front to back of the cortex. Concept of controlling contralateral movement and sensory etc. Unfolded cortex is about 3 sheets of A4, think a lizard or something equally stupid is size of a postage stamp. Neocortex - another name to do with recent evolution.

Could mention prefrontal cortex and explain it using Phineas Gage -america 100 years ago, blowing up mines. accident with a metal pole shooting into his head embedded in his prefrontal. perfectly normal after accident except before was nice and kind bloke, after was mean, nasty and became a criminal. Hence to do with personality.

Can talk about Wernicke's and Broca's - I normally talk about the english pilot who was gunned down sustaining damage to wernicke's area so that he couldn't understand the english doctors and nurses leading him to believe he had been captured by the nazis.

Also could talk more about visual bits, different areas that are important for different things like seeing colour, motion, peoples faces etc. So what happens if these parts get damaged?

Corpus callosum - is it on the left, right or middle? what might it do then?

- Basal ganglia - they're to do with emotion and starting movements. Parkinson's. Could mention Muhammad Ali or Michael J Fox as examples. Ask them what problems they have. Explain by talking about how one bit increases movement and another dampens/decreases movement. In normal people it is balanced, in Parkinson's decreasing of movement is too strong hence shaking. Opposite is huntington's chorea. Also mention that if parkinson's patient was in burning house, he/she would be able to run out of it and if walking across a street and about to be run over would be able to jump out of the way because of brain finding an alternate pathway in an emergency, bypassing basal ganglia. Parents might ask about treatment, mention L-DOPA and also stem cells for dopamine receptors.

- Insula - pain perception (if they look interested in that sort of thing). Gating theory, i.e. can modulate pain signals released from nerves endings at the level of the brain through opiate nerves from insula that release morphine onto nerve endings. Example is when you play football and cut yourself but don't notice the pain till after the game is finished all due to attention being focused elsewhere on the game.

- Cerebellum - What does it look like (chewing gum, mint ice cream??)
Monitors all our movement and helps correct errors, balance (get them to think about how unstable we are because we stand on only 2 feet). Also movement memories - make it relevent to them e.g. what happens if you practice a sport or a musical instrument (you improve -right?), hand eye coordination when you play computer games or play tennis-don't have to look at your hands but you learn to control them.

Explain about cereballar ataxia and overshooting and not being able to touch your nose with your finger when your eyes are closed. Get them to try - normal people can do it, but with a cerebellar injury, you can't touch end of your nose and will just poke
yourself in the eye - gets a giggle. Cortex the area of tea towel, Some cells surface area of a door (purkinje fibres)

- Hippocampus - makes new memories but not to do with storage - kids always ask where memories are stored - truthfully no one knows for sure but all over the place depending on what kind, eg. episodic, motor, semantic. Mention Dorrie from Finding Nemo, ask them to explain what is wrong with
her and relate that to hippocampal damage. Also can mention HM and mirror drawing if you want/can remember.

- Pons, Medulla and Brain stem - things really essential for basic life that we don’t have to think about like breathing, heart beating (a whole new can of worms I always find - could mention how the heart beats by itself but needs the brain to regulate speed), eye movements, chewing etc? So what happens if this bit gets damaged?

other FAQs!

- How does our brain work?(great...)

Having explained about how nerves help your brain to communicate with the rest of the body, explain that the brain itself is made up of lots of little ones all talking to eachother. We get all this information in from our senses, then these little nerves have a good chat to eachother, bit like whats happening when your computer makes a grrring noise (!), and then they make decisions about what we are going to do, and act on them by controlling our muscles to move us around/speak etc.

- How/why do we dream?

Can someone write something good for this pleaaaaaaaase??

- What are all the red bits?

On our model it shows the arteries etc. This can be a good talking point - why does our brain need blood? What happens if parts of it do not get blood any more (often they've heard of strokes etc becuase of grandparents or something)?