Teaching Parts of the Body

If you teach children, one of the vocabulary areas which you cover will almost certainly be Parts of the Body. Here’s a fun way to practise the vocabulary after it’s initially been taught.

• Draw a friendly monster or alien on an A3 sized piece of light card. Give it three legs, six arms, four eyes, five ears or whatever. Cut it up into jigsaw type pieces with each part of the body that you want to focus on on a different piece. (The pieces don't have to be "traditional jigsaw shape)
• In class, distribute the pieces amongst the kids. Point to one and ask "What's that?" - the child replies "It's an ear" or whatever, comes to the table and puts it down. In turn each child says what their piece is, comes up and puts it in position until the jigsaw is complete.
• Divide the children into groups and give out sheets of A3 paper. Each group draws their own monster/alien and cuts it up as before. They then pass their jigsaw to the next group.
• The pieces of the jigsaw are placed faced down on the table. In turn, each child in the group picks one up, says "It's an eye" etc and puts it in position on the table to create the jigsaw.
• They can then exchange jigsaws again and repeat the game with the jigsaw of another group - or you can take in the jigsaws and give each group a new one in the next, or a later lesson, to revise.

If the children are too young to be able to draw the monsters effectively, or if you don't have enough time, then draw extra ones yourself. You could also just do the outline and get them to colour it.

Further Reading ...