This article from Edition 5 of the PYP Essentials newsletter, was published by the NSW / ACT PYP Network in July 2010. It was written by Kathy McMahon from The Illawarra Grammar School, Australia .
Kindergarten students at The Illawarra Grammar School have been considering ‘how the world works’ in regard to the weather and seasons. Our central idea was that ‘Weather and seasons effect animals, plants and the environment’.
Following a stimulus weather video shown on the Smartboard the children contributed several questions for us to explore. Questions were diverse, including: How does the weather make the world beautiful? What happens when the world goes around? How did God make everything?
Placement of the unit in autumn was a brilliant stroke of timing providing us with natural forms of visible contrasting change that we were able to observe, measure and record. We had a wide variety of rich writing stimuli involving simple recounts of wild, windy days, descriptions of torrential rain and the fun of puddles and information reports about weather features. As we studied the effects of extreme weather conditions in the world, we used our own school building development as an example. We recognised the function of the weather as we saw new turf laid in the hot sun, then watched, as it seemed to call out for rain. After weeks of no rain we were all thrilled to see the oval (play area) full of rain and recorded the rainfall in our class made rain gauge.
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Our class created a large book that recorded our journey together. We all contributed ideas and pictures and throughout it we can see the answers to our questions. We now keep it as a reflections book and proudly share it with visitors to our room.
As a finale to the unit the children were asked to paint a picture to show something that they had learnt about our central idea. While the children painted I walked around with a Dictaphone and asked each child to describe their pictures and what they had learnt about our central idea and how the weather and seasons effect animals, plants and the environment. The children’s responses were amazing. Jasmine picked up on the sun’s impact as the earth moved around the sun. Bowen recognised the impact of the weather on his hair, which is spiky when the sun shines (the preferred look), laid flat when it rained and fallen over when the wind blew; a great example of personal connection. Others demonstrated their understanding of deciduous and evergreen trees or the natural beauty of spring (depicted by musical notes floating from the sun as the ants happily walked up a tree stump).
The transcripts from the recordings were very useful assessment documents as the children used new vocabulary and explained their knowledge individually. As our initial questions were varied, so too our learning was varied. Students had opportunities to make joint and independent discoveries. Many of our questions have been answered but these Kindergarten children are now armed with more questions about how the world works.
