KINDERGARTEN
This term, the Kindergarten are delving deeper into their year-long exploration of the Transdisciplinary Theme ‘How We Express Ourselves’. The children will be encouraged to develop the PYP learner profile attributes of being open-minded communicators while engaging with the key concepts of function, form, perspective, and connection. We have refined our Central Idea and Lines of Inquiry to reflect our focus:
Central Idea: We communicate in a variety of ways for many purposes.
Lines of Inquiry: An inquiry into…
Communicating our ideas in different ways through many languages.
Interpreting the ideas of others shared through many languages.
How we express ourselves to connect with others.
This PYP Unit of Inquiry links closely to Outcome 5 of the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework - Children are effective communicators – which describes how children’s “communication and self-expression take[s] many forms including sharing stories and symbols from their own culture, re-enacting well-known stories and using creative arts…to communicate with others” (VEYLDF, 2016, pp 22.) We hope that the children will cultivate this broad understanding of language, recognising that it takes many forms that are open to interpretation.
We want to support children to be confident readers. By this we mean interpreters who can engage with and garner meaning from many language forms such as books, poetry, images, sculpture, spoken word, music, performance arts, and architecture. We want to support children to be confident writers. By this we mean expressive through many mediums and using a range of symbolic and representational thinking, with a growing awareness of the way messages and ideas can be diversely communicated. We hope that the children will develop their understanding that languages are powerful as they allow people to document and share thinking and explore the perspectives of others.
Extensive exploration of language forms supports early literacy and numeracy development. Early literacy concepts are learnt through the rich environments and interactions at Kindergarten, supported by planned moments of intentional teaching around key understandings such as letter sounds. Early numeracy concepts are woven through the unit, with the children hopefully coming to understand that mathematics is a language in itself that involves symbols and the expression of information, problems, systems, patterns and ideas.
We are looking forward to journeying through this learning with the Kindergarten children, and sharing in their insightful discoveries and creative works as the term unfolds.
The Kindergarten Team
poppy.woodhouse@preshil.vic.edu.au
talithacrawford@preshil.vic.edu.au