Projects
The Human Body Project
When a group of 4 year olds had trouble constructing a standing figure made from clay and wire, we asked them ‘What makes your body stand up?’ and they responded with ‘Bones and Muscles!’ The ensuing conversation demonstrated a great deal of prior knowledge and curiosity about the human body, and an in-depth investigation began with research – in the children’s terms: ‘Finding out about stuff.’ 
After the children represented a human body by tracing around a teacher, they gradually ‘filled in’ the body parts as they learned more from reading, discussions, and exploration of artifacts . They included bones, muscles, lungs, heart, and veins. 
Each part of the body was explored through hands-on materials whenever possible. A turkey baster and piping provided a chance to pump water from one place to another, replicating the action of the heart pumping blood throughout the body. The children discovered that water can be pumped upwards….just like blood going from the feet to the heart. 
The brain was of particular interest to the children, who said ‘it tells us what to do, and how to do things.’ We created brains from clay, and this was documented with photography together with the transcripts of children’s theories about what the brain does. 
The documentation, revisited often with the children, afforded them to the chance to think about what they knew, and what else they wanted to know…for instance, how messages travelled from the brain to different parts of the body. We experimented with sending messages in many different ways….with string and cups, feeling vibrations, passing messages from one person to another….this tangent was almost a little project in itself. 
Of course, the children wanted to construct ‘their own bodies’ and so began a long period of drawing and thinking that stretched over weeks. Through examining hands-on materials, reading more books, asking questions of visitors and their families, the children were able to deepen their knowledge and add more and more detail to their drawings. In this drawing for instance, the green creatures are ‘germs….they are parachuting in…..’ 
Germs were a great topic of discussion amongst the children, and they all told stories of how germs had made them sick. They referred to ‘chicken pox germs’ and ‘fever germs,’ and so we asked the children what these germs looked like. They modeled germs out of plasticene, and named each germ according to disease. As the project waned, we shared the work with parents and other visitors, and much of the documentation was placed in children’s portfolios for them to keep. We have been told that some of this work has been posted onto the children’s bedroom walls, as a memory of all the work that they undertook and enjoyed. These photographs represent just a small portion of the many investigations that were part of this project. We took our time with this, exploring tangents along the way, and so probably spent about 8 weeks exploring how our bodies work.
Sue Stacey
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