Funny Bodies ~ Puzzles and Oral Language

 

This little task is alot of fun and inspires so much creativity.

 

Children of different ages will benefit differently from this easy to prepare activity.

 

Learning

 

Younger children aged 2-4yrs can consolidate their knowledge of body parts. They will also be problem solving as they put the pieces together to make a person. They will also use their creativity to create a person.

 

Older children 4+yrs can utilise their creativity by making funny, unique, different body creations. Giving them names, personalities, stories and making family members. They can use their body creations as characters in narratives, either orally or written.

Often these characters are wonderful inspiration for storytelling and learning about characterisation.

 

 

All you need is some catalogues and magazines.

 

Clothing catalogues are good as long as they represent

a variety of ages, body sizes, races and both genders.

 

 

Cut out body parts from the magazine. Some pictures will be good for heads,

some are good for legs etc. Rarely do I find a picture that can be used for the whole body. Try to get a range of different poses, sizes, ages, races and a mix of genders.

 

Depending on the age of your children, cut out the bodies into more or less pieces (lol that sounds so wrong to type). For example, Miss M is just turned 3 so I kept it to 3 distinct body areas for our first time at this, being heads, bodies and arms and legs and feet.

You could cut the arms off the bodies and the feet off the legs etc so that there are more pieces to put together.

 

Older children with well developed cutting skills can do this themselves once shown.

 

 

It was really interesting watching Miss M do this.

She actually wanted to find the exact matching pieces for the bodies, so she choose bodies and heads she believed to match. With each person she started with the legs. She would pic up heads and say "that's not right" "no not that one" "ah that one matches".

She did the lady on the left first, then the girl on the right before finishing with the one in the middle. When picking the head for this one she saw the baby head with the moustache and laughed "that's a funny one", she was getting that these were

funny bodies.

It was interesting that she made a representation of our family, minus the H man.

I was not so impressed with my representation being much larger, what was she hinting at here lol!!

 

She created this picture all by herself and had no trouble working out where the pieces needed to go. Next time I'll make it a little trickier with more body parts.

 

I'm looking forward to doing this one again with her.

 

This was always a favourite lesson in my classroom when learning about characterisation. The children would create the most fantastic funny bodies!

 

Enjoy

 

Play and Learn

 

Katey

 

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