1. The first step in digestion is using your mouth to chew your food. You use your tongue, teeth, and saliva to help break your food apart. We turn our food into a liquified ball called bolus.
2. Your esophagus is the tube that connects your mouth to your stomach. Contractions of its muscles, called peristalsis, pushes the food through the esophagus.
3. Your stomach is at the end of the esophagus. It uses acids to break your food into smaller pieces. It changes the bolus into a yellow liquid called chyme.
4. The chyme is then released into the small intestine. The small intestine breaks down the chyme into nutrients for the body to use. The inner parts of the small intestine has small finger-like coils, called villi, which pick up the nutrients to deliver them to the blood.
5. At the end of the small intestine, the chyme moves into the large intestine (or colon). The main function of the colon is to remove water from the chyme, which is now called feces. The feces moves through to the end of the colon, called the rectum. Feces collects in the rectum until there is enough to "go to the bathroom", when the feces is released at the end of the colon by the anus.
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