Objectives and Key Questions

1, 2. Identify aspects of your own personality.
What makes a person special?

3, 4. Identify aspects of your own experience.
How can we describe our feelings?

Teaching Activities

1, 2. In the first four weeks in school, at the start of each of these lessons, pupils show things they have brought with them and are encouraged to talk about themselves.
Read the story, 'But Martin!' about a visitor to earth who meets a class of pupils who are all different - in looks, behaviour etc. Ask what is special about Martin and the other main characters. (An alternative is 'Cleversticks' by Bernard Ashley.)
Emphasise that everyone can be good at something.
In pairs pupils discuss what they are good at.
Pupils draw a picture of themselves and their partner's faces and an adult scribes their captions to go under each one. (1a)
Introduce idea of a 'Special Person'. Each week one child is chosen as the special person for the week and the whole class share good things about them.

3, 4. In "Circle Time":
- ask pupils to identify what makes them feel good;
- remember events, and how they made them feel;
- discuss playtime incidents and how the pupils felt about them.
Invite suggestions to help resolve these.
Offer the pupils a chart showing a range of facial expressions and ask them to choose the one that best matches how they are feeling.
Ask pupils to collate shared feelings and display the 'feeling words' with illustrations, eg sad, scared, happy, excited etc. This will provide a feelings word-bank to refer to as this unit progresses. (1a)

Assessment Opportunities

1, 2. -

3, 4. Pupils identify aspects of their own experience by linking feelings word with the illustrations. (D1)