Animal Antics Session Plan

Early Years - Pre-school and Year R

Session objectives

• To introduce young children to museums
• To give children an opportunity to experience 5 elements of play: pretend play, games, physical play, constructive play, explorative play
• To cover elements of the Early Years curriculum: personal, social and emotional development, communication, language and literacy, mathematical development, knowledge and understanding of the world, physical development, creative development

Session Plan

Whole class introduction to what a museum is and the sort of things you could expect to find there using some of the collections to demonstrate this. Introduction to SEARCH and the handling and Health and Safety guidelines.

Exploration Box /Bag: activity to be done in small groups with adult help. Each group will be given one object from the collection in a bag to have a look at together. Adult to reinforce how to hold safely while discussing the object with the group using question cards for prompts if necessary : What does it do? What is it made of? What colour is it? What shape is it? How does it work? What happens if...
Areas of learning: CLL, KUW, PSED

Activity Time

Children work in small groups on the activities, rotating around as necessary:

1. Who am I ?
   Dress up as one of the animals or put on a mask and take on the persona of that animal.
   CLL, CD
2. Make a Minibeast finger puppet
   Make you own finger puppet - ladybird, dragonfly or butterfly - to take home. Use the real animals to help. Play with the SEARCH puppets in our puppet theatre.
   CLL, CD
3. Snap and Pairs
   Match the animals to their body parts using the real animals to help. Play 'Snap' or 'Pairs' game.
   PSED, KUW
4. Bug Sorting
   Using buckets of toy minibeasts, sort them into groups or sets by colour, shape, type, number of legs etc.
   MD, KUW
5. Build a home
   Imagine you are a mother or father animal building a nest for your babies. Collect the materials to build a nest and put them together. Try the different materials such as straw, sticks, feathers, string, ribbon, shredded paper, blocks, lego.
   KUW, CD, MD
6. Make an animal
   Make a creature from play dough / plasticine, thinking about the features it needs on its body.
   KUW, CD, MD
7. Tunnel Time and Make a flying visit
   Be an animal crawling through the underground tunnel to collect your food or wear the special glasses and try to land on the flowers in the flower bed to collect pollen.
   PD, CD
8. Magnificent Magnifiers
   Use pictures of animals taken under the video microscope and match them up to the real animals. Use the different types of magnifiers to focus on smaller animals.
   KUW, PD
9. Feely Bags
   Describe the objects in the bags and try to guess what they are.
   CLL, CD
10. Rhyme time
    Listen to the rhymes read out by the adults or recite them together. Look at the real animals in the rhymes and describe them in turn. Discuss how animals are described in well known stories.
    CLL, CD
11. Story Time
    Use the storyboards to make up your own story.
    CLL, CD

Conclusion

SEARCH version of 'There was an old lady' to be sung as a whole group using the real animals as well as pictures of the animals and an 'old lady'.