Activity Set: Where Do You Live?
I chose this activity as I feel its very hands on for the students in my class and very practical and a topic they can easily engage with as it is about their own homes.
I would begin with a matching task where we use parts of a house and match this onto a house template to create a house. I would ensure to use the labels for each part throughout such as roof, door etc. I would then sing a version of the song ‘This is the house that X built’ encorporating the children’s names.
Then we would look at the visuals of houses provided. Visuals are very important in my class as some of the students are preverbal. I would link with home here and ask parents to send me a photograph of the child’s own home. I would ask the child to identify through speech, pointing, AAC device their home. Then we would look at the images and see which house it is like. We would discuss colours and match which colour is their house. I would link it to my family and discuss who lives in my home.
Next using playdough or blocks (some children don’t like the texture of playdough), we would, with support build our houses. We would place these in our tuft tray to create Our Village. I would then give the children time to play with this as I interact with them. I believe play is so important to illicit knowledge from the children. For the children from a farming background I would encourage them to add farm animals. For the child who has a big garden we would add grass. For the child from an urban area we would add buses and traffic lights around their house.
We use our local area a lot so for our next lesson we would go for a walk around our local village and look at other buildings in our area. The local picnic area gives a great safe space to look around at nearby buildings. We would take pictures of local buildings such as the shop, restaurant etc and look at these where we get back to class. We would then add these to our village and again allow the children time to play with the ‘village’.
For our next lesson I would use the story The Three Little Pigs and examine the 3 types of materials they used to build houses. Then we could in small groups make houses from straw, wood, and lego blocks. Using teddies as the wolf we could try to blow the houses down and examine which material is the strongest for building houses.
For Art we could do varying art lessons to draw our houses. One student may paint their house, some may colour in a template of their house, others my use felt and crepe paper to stick together to make their house.