Read about what we're learning and where we're learning!
We are excited to welcome you to Kindergarten for the 2022-23 school year. Already there have been many opportunities to engage with students and teachers.
We began the year with a New Family Orientation session, where we introduced new families into our community. KG also hosted a Back To School night where parents heard from school leadership, met the staff, and engaged with classroom teachers and counselors. Our Parent Teacher Conferences allowed us the first opportunity to share the wonderful experiences we have had enjoyed since the start of the year.
If you’ve visited Kindergarten, you’ll have noticed teaching documentation on the walls. We encourage you to take time to explore this to further understand and value your child’s working knowledge and process.
During the second semester, we will welcome you to visit KG classrooms during teaching time, to see learning in action! We will also host a culminating exhibition of students' work that centers around the theme of Creativity and Innovation.
K2 started off the year with the unit ‘Who We Are’, which allows for inquiries into human relationships, our communities and our responsibilities. We believe that encountering relationships (either with people or places) develops a sense of belonging and a sense of self. The first few weeks were all about getting to know each other and getting to know the routines in school.
Through children’s play, we noticed a big interest in homes and houses. We saw children creating homes and houses with blocks and other loose parts, and we heard the subject coming up in their spontaneous conversations about homes.
The children brought in photos of their families. They noticed that some of us have multiple homes. The idea of ‘home’ is fluid; for some it refers to the house they live in, other children also include homes of other family members outside of KAUST or in other countries.
I have two homes: one is here in KAUST and one is in Colombia. It’s is called a finca.
Amalia
This gave us the idea to provide the children with maps, globes and books about different houses around the world. We also constructed the map of KAUST, although it took a while for the children to realize that this was our community.
Where is Red Sea Mall on the map?
Manu
As well as developing problem solving skills, building the map of KAUST also allowed us to find our houses on the map and other places of importance to the children; Tamimi, the beacon, and our Kindergarten campus.
This map grew in importance in our class. The children also used pictures and symbols to create a key. When the neighboring K2 children visited, our class shared their thoughts and invited them to put their houses on the map. Hearing the conversations between the children made us realize how much they already know about our KAUST community.
My mommy works here, it’s Building 13 on the campus.
Chuhan
From our map of KAUST, we zoomed out to see where our place is in Saudi Arabia, and where Saudi Arabia is in the world; how our small community is part of this global community. Introducing the world map in our class opened up so many conversations about places the children knew or places they have visited; we are so lucky with this truly international-minded group.
After this, it was time for us to go out and around KAUST to find all these places we had marked on the map in the real world! We went by everyone’s house in three different neighborhoods, and we even visited two new playgrounds. We heard the children using lots of directional language on the way
We go straight here and then to the left to get to my house.
Bilal
The children quickly realized that we had forgotten some other important places on our class map; we saw the golf course, KMC and the fire station, for example. Both the community map and the world map will stay up in our class, as they continue to be a great tool for transdisciplinary learning with these four and five-year-olds.
It has been amazing to witness our learning journey unfold with our community as the vehicle to ignite all this. Let’s see where it will take us next!
Educators believe that accessible outdoor spaces are a necessary part of an early years environment, well thought through and well organized to maximize their value and usability by children and adults. Design and planning must support developmentally-appropriate practice driven by children’s interests and needs.
As soon as school started, Kindergarten educators started to build a shared idea of expanding the communal courtyard between classes to enhance and further students’ learning. We looked at the space between our four classes and the resources provided by TKS and spent hours exploring possibilities, playing with materials, and noting the interplay between light and shade. We continuously observed students interacting with the original environment, which was delineated into four separate outdoor workspaces. During our observations, we collected data, and educators co-constructed a new plan. With the full support of our Kindergarten colleagues, we started to develop our new Courtyard.
In the future, educators will continue to provide enough materials and rearrange areas so that students can collaborate and learn alongside their peers.
Children will manipulate the environment throughout the year, looking for ideas and grappling with problems, solving them by taking risks and thinking critically. They will test a range of materials and solutions in different ways, bringing children with similar interests together.
Play is the most important thing for children to do outside and the most relevant way of offering learning outdoors. The outdoor environment is very well suited to meeting children’s needs for all types of play, building upon first-hand experiences.
Jan White, Outdoor Provision in the Early Years, 2011
Because of the freedom the outdoors offers to move on a large scale, to be active, noisy, and messy, and to use all their senses with their whole body, young children engage in the way they most need to explore, make sense of life and express their feeling and ideas. Many young children relate much more strongly to learning offered outdoors rather than indoors.
Gitta BakonyiKG Teacher
