Shake them Skeleton Bones!

It is exciting to start the cultural theme this year as we are working on a familiar yet complicated topic – The Human Body.

The Aunties first gave the children an overview of the human body and their five senses. Children love singing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes” with the omission of different body parts. They often laugh hysterically if someone in the group makes an error to sing out the missing part of the body.

Children learn about the human body parts through songs. They love it!

Auntie Latifah used "Life Models" to teach the children different body parts.

Auntie Margaret was preparing the materials to stimulate the children's senses.

Each child from the Nursery group had a chance to isolate his/her sense so to refine his/her senses. To refine the gustatory sense, the child was blindfolded and nostrils were "closed" so to isolate the taste sense (Picture on top). To refine the tactile sense, the child was blindfolded and felt the item naming it rough or smooth (Picture at the bottom).

Then, with the courtesy of Dr. Theva and Dr. Mun, who are parents from our graduate student Kareena, we managed to borrow a REAL human body skeleton to school! This skeleton was even taller than any of the Aunties! The children and teachers were in awe when they touched and felt the REAL bones of a human body. This concrete experience was indeed inspiring.

The Human-size skeleton and its skull gave the children a very good concrete experience.

The children also worked on skeleton puzzle and some work that reinforce and extend the learning of bones. The younger ones learn about bones in their various names, such as head bone, neck bone, back bone, finger bones, thigh bone, foot bone and toe bones. The older ones were introduced to more advanced terms like the skull, ribcage and spine. Everyone enjoys learning about bones, and they love singing the song of bones too.

The older children were good at fixing the huge skeleton puzzle and labelling each bone.

The younger children were good at fixing the skeleton puzzle too under the guidance of Aunties. They were very excited especially moving from the concrete experience of Human-size skeleton to a huge 2-D puzzle.

Aunties will continue to teach other extensions of bones to the children doing craft and experiment in the next few weeks. The children are all looking forward to the activities!