The Kindergarten Kids Explore Their World

-------- Steven Howard Hyman

We are now past the halfway point of the first semester and it has been a busy and exciting time for the staff and students. For me personally, being a new teacher at Huamei Kindergarten, I have been made to feel very welcome and it has been a fun and fulfilling period.

IB has been successfully implemented within the kindergarten and has been firmly embraced by the teachers. As a result the students are now having more input into their education, a key element of the PYP, and there are lots of smiling faces.

The senior students fully enjoyed their previous learning about the body, the benefits of a good diet and how to live a healthy lifestyle through making positive choices.

Over the last number of weeks the junior classes have been exploring reasons for choosing different types of vehicles and have been learning to make educated choices when forms of travel are required.  They’ve been experiencing different forms of transport and learning basic traffic signs to help them get around.

The medium classes have been examining the influence that discoveries and inventions have been having on people’s lives. They carried out experiments into gravity, by dropping items from height and seeing which ones float and those that drop to great amusement. They’ve also been looking at how forms of communication have brought the world closer together and have looked at different types of phones and used them to speak to each other.

Lastly, the senior classes have been looking at why we use signs and symbols and have been taking walks around the school looking at signs and discussing how they help us to communicate. They were also encouraged to take a look around their local neighbourhoods and find signs and symbols that help to make our lives easier.

All of the students have been putting great effort into learning about how the world around us works.

As we move towards Spring Festival we all continue to strive to help educate the children of Huamei Kindergareten in fun and exciting ways.