Body Part Hunt: A Classroom Scavenger Hunt
Have you ever seen how much kids love hide-and-seek? It actually drives me quite crazy because hide-and-seek can be a truly dangerous game. There are some really good hiders who choose some unsafe places to push their bodies into. But there are great reasons to hunt for things: becoming aware of one’s surroundings, exploring the world, making connections, developing spacial awareness, and problem solving. So what’s a safety oriented teacher to do?
Body Part Hunt:
Read, Write, and Roam
Kids love to roam around the classroom and they’re super interested in (school appropriate) body parts in early childhood. I use this opportunity to put my science lessons within my literacy station rotational activities and use science forms in my Write the Room or Read Room. The roaming station activities are a definite student favorite because they are finally free to walk about the room at their leisure. I use the worksheets in a pictures below as a ready-to-go activity that encourages counting, body awareness, and math patterns to develop a greater understanding of the basic body parts.
Easy Set Up and Fun Props
I love this activity because it’s super easy to set up. You really just need a clipboard and a pencil. The students love when it’s spiced up with colorful or crazy markers, binoculars, silly glasses, and cool pointers. Since this activity is placed within a rotational center that is available year round, all of my students are aware of how to use all the different props. They know that pointers are for pointing or very light touching. They have been taught how to use a clipboard. And they understand how to “wander” around the classroom without disturbing other students in stations.
Add One Extra Piece of Paper for Optimal Success & Help for Your Students with Special Needs
The trickiest part of this lesson is actually making sure that the students are able to count everyone when people are actively moving and engaging in several different activities around the classroom all at once. To help with this, I keep a class list with students’ names. The kids can check off each person’s name as that child has been counted. This method helps students see how the numbers change when others are absent. Providing a list of all the students is also a great way to help students with special needs visually organize their work. If you have a class roster with all of your students’ pictures on it, that is even more helpful especially for your students who are not yet reading fluently.
Teach Compassion and
Awareness of Differences
This is a great activity to remind students that we are all different and that while most of us have two arms and two legs not all of us were born that way. It’s a great time to talk about sensitivity to individuals with disabilities and to celebrate our unique differences along with how those differences make us stronger together.
Challenge Your High Achievers
Some students may easily pick up the pattern within this activity that shows that if there are 26 arms in a classroom there will typically be 26 legs in a classroom. They might also see that all of the numbers are typically even for body parts in pairs or the number of noses are half that of the number of eyebrows. Encourage this awareness and make sure you have prepared them to create their own body part sheet on the back of the paper or on a plain white piece of paper if students finish early. Patterns are an important part of science and our daily lives. Watch your young scientists become aware of the patterns around them.
Get your ready-to-print
Body Part Hunt Sheets
