Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

I love doing assessments wherein the assessment is itself a form of input. We've been learning about body parts, among other things, in Latin I. We've labeled kids with duct tape, created facsimilia of people, discussed monsters, et ita porro. We now know - because to an extent, I let the kids drive which body parts they want to know - some unusual body parts, including eyebrows, backs of knees, back of neck and chin.




At the end of all this, I asked the kids to shout out a list of as many of them as we could come up with (twenty-four, as it turns out. thirty-one if you're the uppers and you don't let them include viscera and other internals. I didn't know I had thirty-one body parts). Then, one by one, I called kids (volunteers first) to the front of the room. The whole class, together, sang head-shoulders-knees-and-toes, but when we got to the eyes-ears-mouth-nose section, I instead took suggestions from the class, and the kid up front had to touch those instead. By the time we got through all forty-three students, they were 100 percent sure of all their body parts, and they'd taken a vocab quiz they thought was hilarious and stress-free.