We started by reading and watching the story about the Big Skeleton, the Little Skeleton and the Dog Skeleton.

We joined in with the parts of the story we could remember, and found our favourite page in the book and explained why we liked that part of the story best.

We also made our own 'Funnybones' concertina books by sequencing pictures from the story, then we used these to help us act out and retell the story at the small world area in the classroom and we set up a Funnybones tuff spot outside to retell the story.

 

We liked the part of the story where the skeletons go up the dark, dark staircase to go outside, and down the dark, dark staircase to go back to their home in the cellar.

We used wooden blocks to make a staircase then tested it out using one of our skeleton characters!

 

In the story, the skeletons visit the park and the zoo on their nighttime adventure.

We thought about other places the skeletons might like to visit to find somebody to scare! We had some very creative ideas!

 

One of our favourite parts of the story was when the Dog Skeleton chased after a stick that the Big Skeleton had thrown for him, but he crashed into a tree and fell apart. The skeletons tried to fix him back together again, but they got in a bit of a muddle and kept putting the bones in the wrong places! We made model people from Popoids then muddled up the arms, legs and head!

 

We put together jigsaws of our own faces, made funny faces using parts of different people's faces, and drew funny features onto photographs of ourselves. 

 

The story inspired us to create skeletons from different materials including cotton buds, playdough and pipe cleaners. 

 

We looked at pictures and model skeletons to help us create life-like skeletons and put together laminated bones and bones we had found in our sand tray to see how the bones are organised inside our bodies. The song 'Doing the Skeleton Dance' was fun to dance along to and was all about how our bones are joined together. We even found out the special names for some of our bones such as skull, spine, pelvis and ribs, and that they help us to stand up and move but also protect important parts of our bodies such as our brains, hearts and lungs. 

 

In the Copse we went on a bone hunt and also searched for sticks to build skeletons with our friends.

 

We each drew a skeleton with white chalk on black paper.

You can see we have included lots of details.

Our fine motor activities were bone themed too. We threaded pasta 'bones' onto laces, placed bean 'bones' onto an x-ray of a hand, used chopsticks to move cotton wool ball 'skulls' and added wooden peg arms and legs to a skeleton torso!

 

As well as finding out about our skeletons, we also thought about our bodies and had fun using our senses to explore!

Here we are making and smelling different flavours of fruit teas.

 

We used our muscles to grind up coffee beans, juice citrus and used a pestle and mortar to crush herbs. Some of us liked the smells and tastes, but some of us definitely did not!

 

We used our sense of hearing when we played listening games. For the game 'Soundtracks' we listened carefully to sounds and if we had a photo of what made the sound we could cover it with a counter. We also tried to try to guess what had been sealed inside plastic eggs. We shook them and listened carefully before matching the eggs to a photo of what we thought was hidden inside.

 

We used our sense of touch to try to guess what we could feel inside feely boxes and described what each item felt like.

 

One of our jobs outside was to measure how tall we were. We cut a piece of ribbon the same size and will keep these until the end of the school year. 

 

I wonder how much the Antelopes will have grown when we measure again in the Summer term!