Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

My lesson today was 'I Have a Body' the children were extremely fidgety. No matter what I did I couldn't get them to settle at anything. So eventually I made them teach themselves. Probably not the easiest thing I could have done, but I was all out of ideas.

The lesson was mainly on how we got our bodies and how we should treat our bodies with respect, by namingly, following the Word of Wisdom. This in itself was a hard concept to explain to 3 year olds. Luckily they are too innocent to know what tea, coffee, alcohol and tobacco is, so I had to explain what they were too; bad substances for our bodies. Which, if you're religious or not, is still a true statement. We played a game of 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes' and then a game of 'Hinges' which they loved and I think hyped them up for the rest of the lesson.

I decided to go down the route of our bodies being very special because we have 5 different senses that help us. I took in a paperweight my sister made for me which looks like Earth and asked them to look at the pretty colours, I asked them what pretty colours they saw, to which one child answered "I can't see any", she'd realised what I was asking and closed her eyes. I gave them all a chewy sweet and asked what it tasted like, they said sweet and one said lemony. I asked how they knew this and one said "my teeth".

I gave them a small soft teddy bear and asked them to feel it and describe what it felt like. They all said soft, I said "how do you know it is soft?" one child said "Because I have other bears at home" I told them that we feel with our hands but also our whole bodies feel too; and I brushed the bear on their arms; they all giggled. I asked them what cows, cats and dogs sound like, they all made the sounds "mooo", "meow", "woof", I questioned them on how we know this and they pointed to their ears and said "because we can hear".

I sprayed some DKNY delicious perfume in the air and asked them to smell it and they all went "hmmmm" I asked them what they could smell, they couldn't really come up with an answer for this one but they said it smelt pretty. I asked "So what do we smell with", and they all pointed to their noses.

They were definitely hard work today but it just means I need to have more patience. They are beautiful children and I love them all very much. One of them is definitely moving to New Zealand just not sure when but it should be very soon and she will be very missed!