The Body: Child-Led Learning

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about mark-making which showed different stages of drawing people. One of the examples depicted people with legs coming out of their necks, which is quite a common thing for children to do when drawing people.

As a result of this, I thought a good way to progress the children's understanding of the body would be to look at it a little closer and learn about all the different parts. First, we traced someone's body:

Then we made a mind map of what we know about the body. Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the mind map right now, but essentially, it says "bodies" in the middle and the children drew pictures, shared ideas, and wrote words all about the body. One wee boy said that we all have a love heart in our bodies! Another boy prefers writing to drawing, so he wrote words like "feet," "chin," "back," "eye," "eye," (yes, twice, because we have two eyes) "body," and "nose." He wrote it all with minimal support!

Next, we took photos of different parts of our body. The children were in charge of deciding what body parts to photograph and they were in charge of actually taking the photo. The more responsibility the children have, the better.

After we printed the photos, some children helped to make labels for them and we stuck them up on the cut out body tracing on the wall.

Simultaneously, there was a body painting activity going on. The children chose what body part they wanted to print onto paper with paint:

The body painting was so popular, we had to bring the activity outside for some collaborative foot printing:

The paint trays got a little slippery, so there may have been some painty bottoms! If you do this activity with your class, make sure you have some tubs of warm, soapy water, towels, and chairs handy for the clean up!

Speaking of clean up, always get the children to be responsible for cleaning up their own messes. It's their classroom, so they should be responsible for it to have a sense of ownership.

Phew. All that from a drawing of legs coming out of a head! And we're not done yet! The children have shown an interest and knowledge about bones and the heart. I'm hoping to extend their learning experiences with this interest in mind.

Note, these activities did not all take place in the same day. These occurred over the course of a week or so, always adding and extending learning experiences based on things the children said, did, or asked about.