The hands on activities I would choose would be Weather (What Clothes to Wear and Animals in the Cold), using both lesson plans but adapting them slightly.
I would introduce the topic by using a selection of pictures of different locations e.g. the beach, the desert, the arctic, an ice rink, a rainforest etc. I would elicit prior knowledge by asking the children what the weather is like in these areas, how they would feel if they were stood there and what they might wear.
Next I would introduce the songs ‘On a Cold and Frosty Morning’ and ‘Summer Clothes’, where the children sing about clothes they would wear in the winter versus clothes they would wear in summer.
In groups, the children would be given a bundle of clothes and asked to separate them into two hula hoops, one labelled ‘cold weather’ and one labelled ‘hot weather’. In completing a STEM focused SSE, the children could gather materials from their own home and bring them into school. Together, we could create items of clothing suitable for the different weathers.
These activities would then lead us into a conversation on how animals survive in different climates, without the help of clothing. We would have a whole class discussion on animals that live in colder climates e.g. polar bears, whales, penguins. I would show the children images of different animals in their own environments and discuss their unique features that allow them to withstand the different climates e.g. polar bears have blubber to keep them warm or camels with padded feet to protect them from the hot sand of the desert. One activity to show children the effects of blubber that I used in my class last year was spreading Vaseline one hand and allowing them to place both their hands in cold water. Before putting their hands in the water the children completed a think-pair-share activity and predicted what they thought would happen. The children could then see that the hand that had the ‘blubber’ on it did not feel the cold water as much.