This Week’s Early Learning Theme – All About Bodies

How are you getting on with home schooling while we are on lockdown?The first couple of weeks were hard but now we are getting used to it. I am surprised we are doing pretty well, my boys really thrive on routine and seem to be doing well with the reduced anxiety without school and social activities. Thankfully school have been really helpful and provided us with help and resources. I am not sure how long we will be learning at home but as it may be a while so I have decided to try doing theme weeks.

The idea is each week we will have a different topic which we can use to help structure some of our activities. As the kids are still young (4 & 6) I am only introducing topics and it will hopefully make it easier for me to come up with ideas for the weeks activities. I thought I would share here in case anyone is looking for some ideas.

All About Bodies

Bodies, senses and all about me is a topic that my 6 year old did in reception at school and we have been using this theme for many of our activities over the week.

Faces

I got a great ‘all about me’ worksheet from Twinkl which I used with my 6 year old in his TEACCH activities. You can see his self portrait below, I was impressed with his hair! Most mornings we do Attention Autism and for the attention builder we created some flour faces.

We have also been doing some cutting practice recently so created faces with a cutting and sticking activity.

Inside & Outside my body

My son loves puzzles and we have a great one we picked up a while ago at a charity shop, it shows both inside and outside the body.

Also from Twinkl I got a life size cut out skeleton and some internal organs. The first day I pulled out the skeleton my son wouldn’t engage with it so I put it aside and got it back out a couple of days later. I had listed what the bones were on the back but my son nailed it. He is so great at visual activities so this was great for him. The organs I did and showed the kids it was a good visual way to introduce organs to them. We also held them up to our own bodies to demonstrate where they go.

New words

I had some body part worksheets and used some letter tiles for the boys to match the letters and spell out the body part words. This was an activity both boys really enjoyed. My 6 year old was really pleased with himself when he spelt out ‘shoulders’.

Music

The boys are fans of Dr Ranj from Get Well Soon, so one afternoon we enjoyed all the Get Well Soon songs. Over the week we have also been singing a lot of ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes’.

Communication & Our Senses

I have some picture books about the 5 senses (smelling, touching, hearing, seeing and tasting). We have been going through them and I have been trying to highlight when we use these senses over the week. Our attention bucket in the morning has been full of things that make noises to practice our listening skills. We also played some listening games, my son used PECS to highlight what animal noises I played on my phone.

I got a five senses worksheet which we used in the garden to list the things we could:

• See – birds, ants, the sky, the house, clouds.
• Hear – cars, jumping on the trampoline, birds, the cat
• Feel – the wind, the grass, water
• Smell – flowers, the grass
• Taste – the air

We combined touch and body parts in another communication activity. The boys both love tickles so they were requesting which part of the body they wanted to be tickled using PECS cards, this was another popular one.

Play time

We did some role play using our toy Dr kit.

Also some dentist play with Play–doh.

Books & Films

We read Funnybones a few times this week, it is an old favourite but perfect in a week we are learning about skeletons. We also have a great set of books ‘Everything I Need to Know for School’ which includes a book on the human body.

We also made time to watch Coco for some more Skeleton action and Inside Out both brilliant films that fit nicely with our topic.

Do you have any good activities for learning about bodies and senses? Or any suggestions for future topics? Let me know in the comments.

Next week we will be doing Knights & Castles.