Developing Self and Other Awareness:
Personal Appearance

‘What’s in the bag?’

Collect a number of props that relate to the topic, e.g. wigs, glasses, hats, clothes, false beards, make up, jewellery. These props can then be used for children to try on and to start to talk about differences in appearance.

They can also be used to create different characters and to write a short story about them, e.g. Purple Pete, Smiling Sam, Harriet hat, Glenda glasses.

‘Watch this head!’

Use a foam head and props to experiment with different personal appearances.

Use them to try to identify people within the group, or to match pictures or descriptions.

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’

Use a mirror to help children notice different aspects of their appearance.

Use props to recognise how we can change our personal appearance easily. How does it make us feel? What do we like and dislike?

‘Create a collage’

Cut out pictures of people from magazines and get each child to create their own collage.

Take it in turns to look at each collage and notice how different people look. Use it to introduce vocabulary that hasn’t yet come up, e.g. bald, tattoos.

‘Change three things’

Children take it in turns to leave the room and change up to 3 things about the way they look, e.g. change a piece of clothing or jewellery.

The others try and see what has changed.

(Talkabout Activities p.33)

‘Something’s changed’

One child leaves the room while the rest of the group decide on one thing to change.

This could be something obvious, such as one person changing places with another person, or something small such as a piece of jewellery being removed.

The child returns to the room and tries to see what has changed.

(Talkabout Activities p.34)

‘Who goes where?’

Divide the room up into 2 or 3 big circles or areas. Ask the children to go to one of the circles/areas according to a characteristic e.g. long hair, medium length hair or short hair.

Ask the children to arrange themselves in a line according to their height or another characteristic e.g. hair length.

(Talkabout Activities p.39)

‘Describe a picture’

Collect a number of pictures of famous people.

The group agree on a number of aspects of physical appearance e.g. hair colour, sex, age. The pictures are placed where everyone can see them and the children take it in turns to describe one of the pictures, for example: ‘This person has got grey hair, is a woman and is old’.

The rest of the group see if they can guess who they are describing – ‘could it be the Queen?’

(Talkabout Activities p.35)

‘What do you look like?’
The group leader prepares a grid on paper using different categories such as curly hair, straight hair, short hair, long hair, blue eyes etc. 

There should be enough space underneath the headings to write names, or the space to tick next to names. 

The children are then given a sheet of paper each and asked to complete the grid.  They may need to approach the others for example to look at eye colour.  Did everyone put the same names in each category?

(Talkabout Activities p.40)

In the next issue we will continue to consider developing self and other awareness and I will describe some activities to increase awareness into personality.

Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz

Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.