I would link an activity about aliens to learning about ourselves and our body parts.
Trigger story: Aliens love underpants
Read story and discuss. Look at illustrations, describe the aliens. What colour are they? What shape? How many eyes do they have? How are they similar to us? How are they different?
Make a similarities and differences chart.
Get children to cut out and stick their body parts to a template. 2 eyes, 2 ears, one nose, mouth, 2 arms, 2 legs, etc.
Use a traditional dice numbered 1-6, use a blank dice and write heads, eyes, ears, arms, legs, noses. Children roll both dice and have to draw the number of parts on to their alien template e.g 3 legs, etc.
Children take turns and compare their aliens with their partners, focus on math language more/less. My alien has more eyes than yours. Who’s alien has the most arms?
Get the children to colour in their aliens and make an interactive display for the classroom. Get the children to sort the aliens, what criteria? All aliens with more than 3 eyes.
Children to come up with sorting criteria, do some aliens fit into more than on category?
There is so many cross-curricular links with this lesson. Literacy, maths, art to name a few.
I think this will be a fun and engaging activity that will appeal to children’s natural curiosity and imagination.