Our Favorite Body Parts
School: Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences
City/State: Santa Fe, NM
Grade(s): Pre-K
Format(s): Children's book
Subject(s): English Language Arts, Visual Arts
Project Overview
This book was created by preschool children from the Santa Fe School for the Arts and Sciences in Santa Fe, New Mexico as part of a study on understanding students’ own bodies.
Teachers introduced this study as a way to help the preschool students in this school – as part of an explicitly integrated classroom includes students with significant disabilities - become familiar with each other via the similarities and differences among their bodies. Through this study, students proactively learned to respect each other and not judge others for their differences.
Each student picked a favorite part of their body, describing via dictation, why he or she liked that body part. Each entry includes text and a digital photograph of that student’s favorite body part. The power of this book comes from a large extent from the decision to leave the student descriptions in student language – not to edit them to create standard responses – which reveals intriguing ideas and lyric expression from student minds.
How This Project Can Be Useful
- A beautiful model of the value of capturing the words and ideas of students as they appear, rather than always shaping those ideas and words into “proper” adult formats
- Shows compelling photographs that are clearly student conceived
- Students’ words are compelling in part because they are not edited, thus more accurately capturing each student’s thinking and expressive style. For example, one student says, “I love my arm because I like to move my arm and stuff so I can give it air and I can go like this and be a birdie and I can feel something with my arm” (page 4)
- Highlights a clever way of introducing guests to the individual students within the classroom
- Shows students’ thinking – often fresh, lyric, poetic. For example, on page 6, “I like my eyes because they help me see the future and the whole world and the sun and the cloud and the moon.”
Common Core State Standards
| Standard | Long Term Learning Target |
|---|---|
| W.K.2 |
|
| W.K.8 |
|
| SL.K.4 |
|