Family Tree Template

One of my favourite resources is the family tree template that I created, and went perfectly with the book of 2022 National Simultaneous Storytime “Family Tree”. The benefit of using this activity at home or in the classroom is that it allows the children using it to really extend on their awareness of themselves and where they belong within their family.

This resource is very open-ended in that you can:

• Colour in the pictures to represent the family member (they are in black and white)
• Editable names so that you can use the exact names that the kids use for particularly family members such as oma/grandma/nanny

 

What areas within the school and early years curriculum does this benefit?

• Literacy as they read and recognise the names of family members and their titles (EYLF Outcome 5.2)
• HASS as they are developing their thoughts and ideas about themselves in relation to others (EYLF Outcomes 1.3, 2.1 & 3.1)
• Health as they are bringing their awareness to the relationships within their families (EYLF Outcome 2.1, 3.1 & 3.2)
• Science as they are looking at the family dynamic and can also begin to see the early hereditary patterns (such as my grandma has blue eyes, but my grandfather had brown so my dad has brown eyes – because it’s the dominant gene) (EYLF Outcome 4.1, 4.2 & 5.4)

 

There are also a number of ways that you can then begin to build and extend on this, and one was mentioned above, but here’s a little list:

• Graphing out how many grandchildren there are
• Sorting the family into gender, eye colour, hair colour etc and then graphing the information
• Predicting what genes the next baby might have in the family (great if someone is pregnant!)
• Inviting family members in to share their story with the class – or even something that they love to do
• Grouping the varying words that everyone in the class use to label someone (e.g. Oma/Grandma/Nan/Nanny etc)
• Sorting the kids in the room based on their birth order (are they the first child, second, etc)

 

Have you thought about exploring family trees in your classroom? If not, download the resource and see what happens!