Why Farts Are Funny

How annoying, I was right in the middle of teaching my grade 1 kids when ‘pffft’ one of the kids lets a ripper go in our talk circle. Little did I know this we would be embarking an little inquiry of our own.

So after the chuckles subsided, one grade 1 asked ‘Why do we fart’? AND ‘Why do we laugh at farts’? I thought wow what an authentic question! So we thus started thinking about and sharing why our ideas about why we fart. Responses ranged from ‘because we need to poo (thats a whole other inquiry) to because ‘we gave air to our tummy’ – true right??.. we had lots of disagreements and conversations. Everyone seemed to be an EXPERT. 6 year old kids are.

So then we looked up some videos on YouTube about ‘Why we fart’ and talked about that. I guess in PYP speak that would be ‘Function’. It was an authentic way to model some appropriate kid friendly search engines such as KidRex and KidsClick Actually looking at the clips we weren’t all that inspired I think but the real inquiry came in the wondering about WHY we laugh at farts. We talked about ‘taboos’ and behaviour, this opened up into who decides what behaviour is ‘appropriate’ which I thought was an awesome question. We made some links to cultural differences, we talked about burping too (the conversation was a gas..pun intended) and in all we had a great, real conversation together that the kids learned something about their bodies and culture at the same time.

Hey, we adults do it too. Admit it! Here’s a great video sent me by @athwaites ‘Fart in a Meeting’.

Happy Weekend.