This session uses picture book: 'Tusk Tusk' by David McKee Props: Philosophy elephant and masks. One white elephant mask, one black elephant mask, and one grey elephant mask. Print off a bunch of blank elephant masks for the children to have after the investigation. Starter: Introduce the elephant puppet. Introduce the sto...

Stimulus Many years ago in Greece they held a competition to find the best painter. The people of Greece loved beauty in all its forms and tried to find the best in all things. Everyone agreed that there were 2 wonderful painters in the city of Athens, but nobody could decide which of the 2 painters was the better artist. Some people preferre...

This session was developed by specialist David Birch on the topic of Newspapers. You might want to run this along with the Knowledge session, using newspaper headlines as the sentences in the Knowledge session. Thinking Game Break the circle on 'lying'. Stimulus (Use the powerpoint attached to take you through the session.) ...

Unicorn Horns - thinking about things that don’t exist This is a development of ‘Nobody’s home’ from The If Odyssey and is designed to get the class thinking about non-existent entities. These include fictional characters of all kinds, but they also include some more controversial examples such as Santa Claus and the T...

Zeus rules the gods of Mount Olympus.  He also rules over the humans.  He rules with a mixture of love and reward as well as control and punishment.  For when the humans do bad things, such as fight wars (get the children to offer some examples of bad things), he throws down large bolts of lightning and causes big thunderstorms to...

Stimulus There were once five students studying together in a famous and important university. They were reading their holy book and came to the point where it says ‘We must thank God for the bad things as well as the good ones’. They were puzzled, and took their question to the Professor. ‘We understand the part about th...

Designed by Steven Campbell-Harris Starter activity: 'change places if' with a colour focus (change places if your favourite colour is.., change places if you think black is not a colour, change places if you are wearing something blue etc) Main activity: A short poem/Thoughting to read aloud (possibly with the prop of ...

The Philosophy This session follows on from the 'Knowledge' session, but it works independently of that. It gets children to look at the nature of knowledge – where does it come from, and how can we distinguish it from belief or opinion, and what kind of things can we know about? Like 'Tabby Is A Cat', use sentences o...

Adapted from Steve Hoggin's Bikes and Certainty session. The idea behind this lesson plan is to encourage doubt of one’s commitments, to question at what point knowledge is attained, and what that knowledge is of. Props: Philosophy Elephant Whiteboard, whiteboard marker and pre-prepared postcards for the after...