Overview The activities below are suggestions to get you and the children started. They are linked to the Areas of Learning and Development, and are accompanied by ideas for displays and role play areas. There is also a book list to support the focus book. Personal, Social and Emotional Development The Dark - underground things are usually dark. How do the children feel about the dark? Do they have the light on or off when they go to sleep? Have fun with the dark - use torches and make shadows. Read 'Can't You Sleep Little Bear'? Share a dog's dinner! - make snack time extra special by cooking some sausages to share. Healthy bones - talk to the children about the bones in their body. Has anyone ever broken a bone? Try to get hold of a model skeleton, or look at some books. Talk with the children about how we can keep our bones healthy by eating well and exercising. Hand washing - this book is all about digging. Talk with the children about washing their hands after they have finished digging. Why do we wash our hands? What other times should we wash our hands? Being part of a group - at the end of the book Digger the dog invites all his dog friends for a party. Celebrate friendships and being part of a group with the children. Have a doggy party! Being part of a wider community - some children may have parents or carers who do a job that involves being under the ground, or they may go pot-holing for fun! Invite them in to talk about what they do. Knowledge and Understanding of the World Underground animals - investigate animals that dig and live underground such as rabbits or badgers. Collect books about them, use small world wild animals in a tray with earth or wood chips, or take the small world animals outside and do some digging. How do they see in the dark? Set up a wormery- these come as kits so that the children can help you create one. They are great for looking at layers of soil, and watching the worms do their important work! Roots - Korky Paul's illustrations show roots going down into the ground. Talk about what roots do and plant beans or seeds and watch the roots grow down as the shoots grow up. Wellie planters - collect some old wellies and use them as plant pots. Invite the children to help you fill them with soil and plant flowers or herbs in the outside area. You could hide a wellie boot or two in the ground for the children to find first, just like Digger the dog. Being a miner - have a look at what the miner in the book is wearing? Why does he need a hat with a light? What does a miner do? Try to collect some hard hats and make lights for them out of egg box cups and silver foil. Add a torch, a short length of rope and a small spade and pretend to be a miner. On the Tube - have any of the children been on an underground train? Or perhaps they have been on a train that has been through a long, dark tunnel? The children might want to recreate a train with chairs and tickets. Dinosaurs - hide dinosaurs in the sand tray, wash them in the water tray, or play with them in a big tray of wood chips. Look at books with pictures of dinosaur skeletons in them. Talk about how we learn about things from a long time ago when we dig something up. Hide lots of different things in the sand or soil tray. Add a bucket of water and some small brushes to clean up the finds and pretend to be an archaeologist. Communication, Language and Literacy Dark words - talk about being underground. Is it light or dark? Collect some words to do with the dark - black, cold, night, stars, moon etc. You could write them in chalk on black card and hang them up. Or make them into a book. Down words - if we are going underground are we going down or up? Collect some words to do with being down under the ground - deep, tunnel, burrow, dig, dark, earth. Cut out a tunnel from a large sheet of black card and write the words along the tunnel. Add any other work the children might choose to do, like footprints or pictures. Words that rhyme - play games with some of the rhymes in the text - dug, tug, mug, bug, rug etc. Make up nonsense sentences that include some of the children's rhyming words. Story Bag - put some objects in a fabric bag. Invite the children to help you tell their own digging story. Each time one of them has to dig, they could do a digging action and then pull something out of the bag. What will happen next? Listening to clues - hide objects around the outside space. Give the children simple clues to find them. E.g. 'You wear it on your head and it's under a tree'. When all the objects have been found, sit down and tell a doggy digging story with them. Small world - ask the children to help you set up the dolls' house with a piece of green fabric to be the garden. Don't forget to add some dogs! Invitations - supply the children with card and pens and things for decorating so that they can make invitations to a dog's dinner party. Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy Finding things - hide things in a sand or earth tray, or the sand pit outside. Finding them offers lots of counting opportunities. Have a table top sale - the children might like to 'sell' the things they found in the sand or earth trays - especially if some of it looked like treasure! Support them in making price labels, and use pretend money so that they can have fun using money vocabulary (change/how much/pence/pounds etc.) How far down? - if the children are enjoying digging, ask them if they can dig a really deep hole in the sand pit or a patch of earth. How can we measure how deep it is? Let the children explore measuring using their hands, duplo bricks, long rulers etc. If they have dug more than one hole, they could measure them both with string and see which is the deepest. Filling - there are lots of counting opportunities when the children are digging and filling wheelbarrows or buckets. Use vocabulary to describe capacity. Bone treasure hunt - cut out some bones out of card. You could number them. Hide them around the outside space and challenge the children to a bone hunt. Count up how many they have found. Is that all of them? Who has number 3? On the train - the children might want to make a train out of chairs. Collect old train tickets or use card. Help the children find a conductors hat and some money. Support them as they talk about the numbers of passengers, how much for a ticket, where they are going. Creative Development Make lanterns and torches - these will be good for helping to see in the dark underground. Use paper to make lanterns. Try to bring in a real lantern. Make torches using cardboard tubes with yellow tissue paper over the end. The children might like to paint the handle, or stick on/off buttons on. Dog foot prints - Cut a dog print shape in a potato and have fun printing muddy dog foot prints everywhere! Layers and stripes - Korky Paul's illustrations show the layers of things under the ground. Talk about layers and how they look stripy. Invite the children to make layer pictures using a variety of materials - paint, pastel, glitter, collage, pasta. Each layer can be something different. Bones - make bone shapes out of clay. Let it dry and paint them white. Brick walls - there are lots of bricks in the pictures. Use duplo bricks to print walls, making the printed brick shapes fit together. Wiggly worms - make worms out of old tights stuffed with newspaper. Add some googly eyes! Songs - learn the song 'Your leg bone's connected to your knee bone', and sing 'Heads, shoulders, knees and toes'. Physical Development Joining things - some of the illustrations have lots of pipes in them. The children might like to make pipes that connect together using straws, or different sized cardboard tubes. Doggy moves - can the children pretend to dig/stretch/scratch/sleep like a dog? How would a cat move? Build a wall - practice your lifting skills by building a wall using big cardboard boxes. Pushing - use trolleys and wheelbarrows outside. Digging - lots of big movements involved when you are digging. Fetching and carrying - when the children are digging, they might also want to transport some of the earth around the outside area. Small world - train tracks, duplo, Lego etc. Role Play An Underground Cave Drape dark sheets or fabric to form a cave. Add green and brown cushions. Hang thick string from the top to look like roots. The children could paint wavy lines on paper to look like roots and these could be put on the walls. Ask the children to help you cut out worm shapes and add them. Include torches, soft toy animals that live underground, hard hats and lanterns. A Museum Set up a desk and chairs, phone, keyboard, pad and paper to be the entrance area. Invite the children to help you make some tickets out of card for the museum. Try to collect museum guides and maps. Put shelves on two sides for displaying artefacts. Put up posters about dinosaurs/ancient pots etc. Add some books about museums/dinosaurs. Ask the children to help you find things to put on the shelves in the museum. They could have fun making labels for each exhibit. They might want to add a museum shop. Dressing Up Area Make available any dog and cat outfits you have. Or leave out brown/black/grey fabric, and make tails and masks with the children. Include some bowls for feeding and drinking, and some toys that dogs and cats might play with. Don't forget to add a homemade bone or two! Put some posters of dogs and cats on a wall nearby, as well as some books about dogs and cats. Display Tunnels Ask the children to make some printed layer pictures on large sheets of brown sugar paper - they could use sponges or wooden bricks. Put them on the wall as a background. Cut out some sections of tunnel from black card, so that when they are put together in the right way they make a winding tunnel. The children can work together to decorate each of the tunnel sections. They might want to cut out string to make roots, or paint roots on. They might like to paint on worms, or stones, or stick on strips of grey to be pipes. Some children might want to add some shiny buried treasure. When they have finished, invite the children to help you put them up over the printed background paper, so that they fit together correctly. You could hide a little bone somewhere on the display. Can anyone find it? There are lots of other display opportunities - make a display about bones and skeletons with X rays and some of the children's bones they made from clay; make a table top display with a soft toy dog and some toy versions of things a dog might find underground. Hide them under a small piece of dark fabric so the children can get the dog to find them; make a display about dogs and cats, including some real pictures, and photos of any cats or dogs the children have or know, as well as any drawings the children might do of dogs and cats. Book List Books by Jonathan Long and Korky Paul The Wonky Donkey The Duck With No Luck The Fish Who Could Wish A Cat Called Scratch Other books illustrated by Korky Paul The Rascally Cake by Robert Tzannes The Fish Who Could Wish by John Bush Winnie the Witch by Valerie Thomas Winnie in Winter by Valerie Thomas Call me Sam by Teresa Lynch Books related by theme Can't You Sleep Little Bear? by Martin Waddell and Barbara Firth Funny Bones by Allan Ahlberg Dinosaur Dreams by Allan Ahlberg Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs by Ian Whybrow and Adrian Reynolds Dinosaur Stomp by Carol Diggory Shields and Scott Nash Bumpus Jumpus Dinosaur Rumpus by Tony Mitton and Guy Parker-Rees Under the Ground by Sally Hobson Under the Ground (Usborne) by Anna Milbourne and Serena Riglietti See Under the Ground by Alex Frith and Colin King One Mole Digging a Hole by Julia Donaldson and Nick Sharratt The Story of the Little Mole who knew it was none of his business by Werner Holzwarth
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