What’s Inside Our Bodies?

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By Karen Hart

Children are always fascinated by what’s going on with their bodies – both on the outside and the inside! To explore this idea in greater depth, we tried a series of activities with the children – here are the most popular for you to try in your own setting.

The aim of these activities is to get children thinking about their bodies and how they work. When we tried them in our setting, they sparked a lot of interest, with children not only asking questions but also enthusiastically sharing their own stories of baby ultrasounds, skeletons, and x-rays. If you can manage to get some real x-ray pictures to show your children, this is a great way of revealing what is actually inside us. Alternatively, this resource sheet includes some useful x-ray examples.

Activities in this article:
1. Moving hands
2. Life-size skeletons
3. All about x-rays
4. Mini Funnybones
5. Baby animals

You may like to extend these activities by looking at the work of doctors, nurses, dentists, vets and so on, for example by turning your home corner into a doctor’s or vet’s surgery. Another idea is to create a special ‘what’s inside us?’ book corner and include some books on the subject aimed at early year’s children. The Funnybones books by Janet and Allan Ahlberg are real favourites and ideal for shared reading.