Jelly good fun in KS1!

Selected song: Jellyfish by Gideon Miller

Jellyfish are found in every ocean and they are neither vertebrates nor fish, which has led some American aquariums to rename these creatures ‘jellies’ or ‘sea jellies’! The Song Bank song Jellyfish is appealing, humorous, catchy and would make a perfect introduction to a topic about the sea.

Life beneath the ocean has always intrigued land-dwellers: consider those much-loved stories The little mermaid and 20,000 leagues under the sea or the magical scene in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks with its classic song, ‘The beautiful briny sea’. This interest grew as divers brought the first footage to our screens in the 1950s, introducing us to the extraordinary creatures inhabiting the ocean world. Decades later, we're still captivated by images of marine life, a fascination which can be harnessed to provide a rich and stimulating topic for KS1.

Introduce The Song

• Play the performance track, listening out for the triplet (1, 2, 3) rhythms in the opening ‘da, da da da’ section: these occur throughout the piano part and give the song a watery, wavy lilt. The song is constructed in sections (details are available in the notes and activities in the Song Bank). Don’t attempt the harmony part with this age group, but revisit the song in KS2 and teach the countermelody to give this piece a new musical dimension.
• Warm up voices by joining in with the section at bar 30 where a short melody repeats 10 times to the nonsense rhymes, eg. ‘Don’t call us smelly fish’, ‘We wear a welly fish’, ‘Go down the deli fish’, etc. … sung to a descending tune.
• The song uses a fairly demanding range of notes, but its engaging lyrics make it well worth learning and, if voices are warmed-up and prepared properly, the melodic scope won’t be too daunting.

Science

• Encourage children to research jellyfish using reference books, IT skills and approved websites. Here are a few amazing facts to start:
  – These fascinating creatures have no bones, no cartilage, no heart, no blood and no brain!
  – Jellyfish are 95% water and have lived in our oceans for 650 million years.
  – Most varieties are neither male nor female.
  – One of the largest is over two metres wide.
  – Collective nouns for jellyfish include a bloom, a swarm and a smack!

Numeracy

• Use jellyfish facts to stimulate problem solving, eg. There are 20 jellyfish in a smack. Five swim to the surface; five more are swept away by the current. How many jellyfish are left? Invite children to invent and solve more jellyfish problems.

• Suggest that the children work in small groups to make board games that reinforce addition facts. On an A3 sheet, mark out a winding track or ladder roughly 2cm wide, reminiscent of a Snakes and Ladders board, adding lines to ‘box in’ the numbers 0 to 30 (or whatever numbers best suit the children’s experience), then draw lots of underwater creatures in the empty spaces. Use blank dice (or hexagonal spinners), writing +1, +2, +3, +4, +5 and +6 on the faces, or substituting more challenging computations as appropriate. Find a cup and some counters and you’re ready to play Marine Monster Maths (have a look at our Bonus Content page)! Alternatively, make a different game by using subtraction dice and beginning at the highest number. For pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN), devise a track with a smaller range of numbers and use simpler commands on the dice.

Literacy

• Once the song is familiar, encourage the children to substitute their own nonsense jellyfish rhymes for the section at bar 30, eg. ‘My name is Kelly fish’, ‘My friend is Nelly fish’, ‘Let’s dance a belly fish’, ‘We learn to spelly fish’, ‘A bony skelly fish’, ‘Let’s make a jelly wish’.

Speaking, Listening and PSHE

• Try a ‘chain’ story! The leader begins with a story opener: ‘Once there was a lonely jellyfish and …’, then a child offers another idea to take the story further: ‘… he had no friends in the sea so …’. A second pupil picks up the thread: ‘… he swam alone by a rock and didn’t talk to anyone, but then … ’, etc. The aim is to end each ‘link’ with a sort of verbal ‘connective’ cliff-hanger – and, as, but, so, although, in spite of – to encourage the use of more complex sentence constructions. As part of the preparation and introductory work, ask the children to consider why the jellyfish was lonely in the first place, giving the story a PSHE emphasis and providing opportunities to discuss issues of friendship, inclusion and fairness.

Creative Writing

• Show the children examples of shape poems (see more on our Bonus Content page) – there’s one in Alice in Wonderland about a mouse’s tail. Collect vocabulary and descriptive phrases about jellyfish and arrange them to fit into a jellyfish outline. Decide on one really evocative or expressive word to ‘fill’ the tentacle shapes. For SEN pupils, try collecting single descriptive words to write (or scribe) on small sticky notes to fill a jellyfish outline. You could adapt this idea for any marine creature.

PE (dance)

• Choreograph an underwater dance, using movements to represent aquatic life forms. Ask small groups to investigate and explore:
  – weightless body movements for jellyfish or seaweed
  – waving, floating and drifting
  – sinuous arm movements for tentacles
  – scuttling sideways crab movements
  – arms slamming like clam shells
  – fast-paced travelling and turning for barracudas or sharks. 
• Find a piece of suitably watery music and arrange a sequence of your pupils’ dances. ‘The Aquarium’ from Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns would work well.

Art and Design

• Watch some underwater film footage, then plan a class seascape using a display board. Tie-dye or sponge-paint a sheet with ocean colours for the background, adding marine creatures, coral, shells and seaweed created in fabric collage. Experiment with padding some of the items to add texture and consider suspending some from transparent thread in front, to create a greater sense of distance. It would be worth acquiring some shimmery, transparent gauzes, voiles or plastic material to create a sensational smack of jellyfish!
• You can also get the children to make model jellyfish to enhance a performance. Use paper bowls or plates and stick trailing crêpe paper ribbons to the concave side for tentacles. Make a loop on the top to fit over the index finger and let your jellyfish bob up and down as you sing.

Desing Technology & Science (Food)

• Make jellies! Try mixing different jelly cubes together for interesting shades or make a stacked jelly of different coloured layers. This requires real patience, because each layer has to set before the next can be added without melting the previous ones … an excellent activity for exploring capacity, temperature, solid and liquid states, and measuring time!

So let’s reinstate the jellyfish – no longer simply a scary stinger, but a beautiful marine survivor – now immortalised in Gideon Miller’s fun song!

Sue Nicholls has published many books for generalist teachers with A&C Black and contributed several songs to song collections. She works as a freelance music education consultant, providing nationwide INSET and training. 

Song Bank

Swim along to the Song Bank for other nautical offerings, including:

• Down there under the sea
• Puffin
• Song of the fish
• The mermaid
• Under the sea