This session has been put together by Oliver Leech and is closely related to 'The Meaning of Ant Life' in Peter Worley's The If Machine. Philosophy This session introduces a discussion of purpose in the context of the concept of parts in their relation to the whole. We think of parts as serving a purpose, or perhaps it would be...

Resources 4 pens (pen person’s arms) A small sandwich box (pen person’s body) A ball (pen person’s head) Key controversies What makes you a person? Can you be a person without certain things (limbs, for example) Starter sit children in a circle One by one draw the objects out of a bag and ask a c...

Year 3 and up Key ideas To what extent are animals similar to people? Do they have rights? Should they be treated the same or different? Are pets people? Stimulus Place two boards in the centre of the circle.  One with ‘a person and one with ‘an animal on it. Ask children to point at people and then point at animals ...

Context Play this video to the class, first providing the following context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e6Cfq_YchM This is a clip of the 100m men’s final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The two fastest sprinters were Carl Lewis, an American sprinter, and his longtime rival, Canadian Ben Johnson. Although Johnson held the current...

Phunny Phone? Take a smart phone with an ‘intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator’ function such as ‘Siri’. Ask Siri to tell a joke. You could do this more than once. Task Question: Is Siri funny? Nested Questions What is ‘funny’? What makes someone funny? Can or co...

Starter activity I start by getting the children to play a game of 'True For You'; they should change places if what I say is true for them. After beginning with a couple of easy ones ('I am a girl', 'I am wearing red' etc) I usually include a couple of slightly harder ones ('I don't understand the rules to thi...

An original two-minute play by Darby Smith. Revised by Paul Bodin. (NOTE:  Student 1 should be acted by a girl, and Student 2 should be acted by a boy.  Fill in the names of people <inside special brackets> before performing the play.) For information on how to use this play in the classroom, take a look at Pete's ...

IS THIS A POEM? This is a session came out of a unit of work on poetry. The class had being doing philosophy for 16 weeks and were doing a unit of poetry in their English classes.  Ever since Socrates, philosophers have tried to define terms clearly and exhaustively. This has resulted in a good deal of rigour and precision. Philosophe...

BACKGROUND This session is a good way for children to look at which things religions have in common and which things set them apart. If we don’t know much about another religion it is easy to make the mistake of assuming that its followers do the same as us or that what they do is completely different when actually the differences are s...