All about me

[Jellypudmum]

Not the most imaginative topic for my first term in a new school
Anyone know of any good free resources?
Am making a doctors role play area but would love to do something a bit more exciting to bring the topic to life.
Tried to book nurse talk etc but so far no joy.
Would love to intro the topic with something out of the norm / Big Bang? But no inspiration has hit yet!!
Anyone know where I could get a cheap skeleton?????

[toomuchicecream]

Last autumn I had this topic with my 1/2 mix. Once we started it took on a life of its own - largely because an unfeasibly large number of parents were medically qualified. So we had visits from a dentist, doctor (psychiatrist!), cardiac nurse, paramedic, physiotherapist and osteopath.

A great lesson I did early on was naming external body parts. The planning I inherited said I should give the children a body outline each and get them to do a cloze-style name the bits. Yawn. In their topic groups they were given a piece of wallpaper, had to draw round the smallest group member, decorate the body and add as many sticky labels as they could naming parts. There was some kind of points incentive for each part they labelled correctly.

It was a lovely afternoon. They really engaged and worked together. I learnt a lot about the children by watching how they tackled it. I also discovered that the standard year 1 expectation of hand/foot etc was well beneath them as they could already do a lot more.

We also had a good afternoon on the senses where I set up 5 activities and they carouseled round them. My TA had blindfolds on them while they taste lemon segments, cheese and ready salted crisps. I had a wide range of things in paper cases for them to identify by smell. The feely bags, Kims Game and name the sound were independent.

But I started with self portraits. I used the old TES idea of taking an A4 photo of each child, cutting it in half lengthways and then sticking it onto a piece of plain paper. They then had to draw in the missing half. It worked really well, and had the added bonus of knowing who was who by looking at the photo!

Warhol and Picasso (I think) style self portraits also came in somewhere.

[toomuchicecream]

Thought I'd better send that mammoth post before I hit the wrong button on my phone and deleted it...

For me, the good thing about the new curriculum is that there is less of it (for the foundation subjects) than before, so we should be able to move away from the constant race for coverage and be able to follow the lead of the chdren more. My topic titles are all quite boring but I'm not changing them as I'm viewing them as a starting point. I certainly didn't expect to end up looking at the central nervous system or discussing how they saw your ribs open in a heart bypass with 5 and 6 year olds. But they really got into the topic so I just ran with them!

There was also a Maths lesson from We Can Do It on time where they learnt to use stopwatches and then times themselves doing skipping, jumping etc.

I enjoyed my class last year - I'm hoping the new ones will vs as much fun:)

[Jellypudmum]

Thanks Too Much.
Have done the drawing around actual childrens bodies before and loved it.
Ledford going to try the senses investigations!!!