Okay kiddo, imagine your muscles are like a playground with two parts: the monkey bars and the swings. Your monkey bars are like your muscle fibers, and your swings are like your proteins.
Now, your muscles are made up of tiny little fibers called sarcomeres. These sarcomeres are the ones responsible for making your muscles move. Inside the sarcomeres are myosin and actin proteins, and they work together like friends at the playground.
The myosin proteins are like the kids on the monkey bars. They grab onto the actin proteins, which are like the kids on the swings. The myosin proteins then pull the actin proteins closer to the center of the sarcomere, just like you would pull yourself across the monkey bars.
This pulling action shortens the sarcomere and makes your muscle contract, which is how you move. Just like how you have to let go of the monkey bars to move to the next one, the myosin proteins let go of the actin proteins and grab onto new ones to start the process all over again.
So, the sliding filament model is basically how your muscles work. The myosin proteins pull the actin proteins closer together, which shortens the sarcomere and makes your muscle contract. And like kids on a playground, they keep doing this over and over again to keep your muscles moving.