Basing loosely on the multiple intelligences model, I had listed down very briefly what we did. Unfortunately, this time round, I had no time to take many pictures!
1) Visual/spatial intelligence
I sketched out 2 big A3-sized outlines of their bodies, and customised these to each of the Bees. Each Bee had 2 body outlines to experiment with. For Little Bee, we took one and created a body board game, which was quite cool. However, as we drew in more game boxes, we kind of lost the winning outcome of the game! Although, on hindsight, I think it was a nice way to inculcate in Little Bee that not all game boards are about winning. The journey itself is more fundamental. The board game was good to reinforce addition and subtraction, with little boxes on "Move 10 steps forward" or "Go back 6 steps", etc. I pretty much let Little Bee design the game board - but we had yet to play it!
For the other body outline, Little Bee drew the major systems of the human body and identified where these were - veins/arteries, heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, stomach, big/small intestines etc. This was another augmentation to what she had already done in school.
We also learned about bones and skeletons, so Little Bee completed a very simple craft using earbuds to re-create a skeleton, which was really fun for her.
2) Linguistic intelligence
We read many books about how the human body functions. Children's books on these were amazing - the vocabulary was fun, the concepts was refreshingly simple and the experiments were fabulous to reinforce these concepts.
Little Bee created a mini book on "My Amazing Body", which was really a nice fusion of what she had learned in terms of the vocabulary of different parts of the body and the application of the concept of numbers to these parts of the body. The illustrations were done entirely by Little Bee, and I thought these reflected her quirky sense of humour. The cover of the book was drawn using chalk, and she had great fun with that!
I had yet to do Chinese learning, but will attempt to do so soon - it will be more complete if I can reinforce the English vocabulary of different parts of the body in Chinese.
3) Logical-mathematical intelligence
We learned about the connection between numbers and parts of our body from the previous exercise on the mini-book. We also played around with some recommended child-friendly experiments from some of the books which really helped to enhance the application of concepts to real-body understanding. Unfortunately, I could not really remember many experiments now, except for a few - the common experiment of blowing in and out into a balloon to illustrate how our lungs work, asking the children to clench and unclench their fists non-stop for a minute to demonstrate the effort of our pumping heart which will pump in this manner for decades, and getting the children to open their eyes wide without blinking to drive the importance of blinking - and many more!
4) Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence + musical intelligence
There was a week when we were learning about bones, so we watched a hilarious video about the song Dem Bones, while singing and dancing to the tune, imitating the many skeletons on the music video - laughing, prancing and singing. Fun!
We also had fun moving different parts of the body to illustrate the workings of the major muscle groups and how they are helping to move these parts of the body.
5) Intrapersonal intelligence + existential intelligence
I could not find activities relating to this theme to reinforce interpersonal intelligence, but hopefully this is something that I always endeavour to inculcate in them irregardless of any thematic learning! I also could not find time to focus more on naturalistic intelligence.
However, we reflected a lot about the importance of the different functions of the human body to keep us alive. We discussed about what would happen when our heart stops beating, when certain parts of our body (eg kidney) stop functioning - and I hope this fosters self-reflection in them.
In all, a very enriching theme indeed!
