Thursday 3 March 2016

Stick Man Activities

Here's an idea for WorldBookDay, a perfect way to link a great book character with the natural environment without the added parental pressure of children dressing up.


Activity Title: Stick Man 
Subject: Early Years/KS 1 

Age Group: Early Years/KS 1 

Overview of the Activity
Design and construct Stick Man characters using sticks, twigs and other natural materials and use them to tell stories in the outdoors.

Equipment Required
The Stick Man book to read aloud, pictures of Stick Man, sticks and twigs of different lengths and thicknesses, leaves, string for tying, pencils and paper for initial drawings, camera.

Learning Objectives
  • Listen and respond appropriately to spoken language.
  • Maintain attention and participate actively in collaborative conversations. 
  • Use spoken language to develop understanding through speculating, hypothesising, imagining and exploring ideas. 
  • Participate in discussions, presentations, performances, role play, improvisations and debates. 
Set Up
Get a copy of the Stick Man book and schedule a time to read the Stick Man story to your pupils ideally in an outdoor environment. Find the right location, ideally with a suitable tree which might be the Stick Man’s ‘family tree’.
Ensure that you have lots of materials for pupils to create their Stick Man characters (these will need to be collected over a period of time). You will also need the means to be able to connect and attach different component parts to each other.

Main Activity
“Stick Man lives in the family tree with his Stick Lady love and their Stick Children 3” goes the introduction to the book. This beautiful rhyming story tells of the misadventures of Stick Man and provides an excellent theme for pupils to create their own Stick Men (and of course Stick Lady and their Stick Children).

First read the story aloud to pupils. This can be done in the classroom, however it works much better outside. You can even identify a tree with a hole in it and place a pre-constructed Stick Man figure in it to help bring the story alive. 

Then using simple sticks and twigs get pupils to create their own version of the character. Find a suitable working area where the pupils can sit and do this uninterrupted. Ensure that you have plenty of materials for them to select from. Once the Stick Men have been created encourage pupils to place them somewhere in the working area and to devise a short story telling of the trouble that Stick Man finds himself in and how he escapes.

Plenary
Take photos of the Stick Man in their respective places found by the pupils.
Discuss how easy/difficult they found the construction of their Stick Men.
Pupils can re-live their stories of Stick Man’s scrapes.

Extension Activities
Pupils can continue their stories and link them together to create a further tale. See if you can get the stories written and told in rhyme (like in the book).
For a greater challenge you can get pupils to also create picture and a full storybook to extend the activity over several weeks. 
Try creating an animated film (either indoors or outdoors) using the same natural material Stick Men.


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