Yearly Life at Somerhill

Kindergarten round-up

Kindergarten children have whizzed through the first term of the school year thoroughly enjoying our new transport topic ‘On the Move’. We have looked at different modes of transport travelling across land by road and rail, over the sea and even through the air. The children painted their favourite road vehicles and we have had colourful traffic jam displays in our classroom depicting cars, buses, motorbikes, diggers and tractors. We have counted the number of wheels on our vehicles and explored wheel size comparisons between different vehicle types. We have been transport engineers, designing and building junk model trains: selecting the right size and shape of box for each element of our designs and adding collage pieces to depict doors, windows, lights and funnels. We also collaborated with friends to create some magnificent train tracks across the length of our classrooms for our toy trains to travel on. For water transport, the children experimented with a colour-wash paint technique to create a stormy seascape and added black 2D shapes to create their own sailing boat silhouettes. We explored floating and sinking concepts and tested an assortment of objects in the water tray, trying to predict if they would float or sink and testing them to find out. We had a very exciting week looking at air transport, finding out about helicopters and aeroplanes and sharing our experiences of travelling overseas for holidays. We launched our own mini hot air balloon in the hall using a hairdryer for hot air and watched in amazement as it rose up to the ceiling before landing very gracefully back down on the ground as the air inside cooled down. We also watched footage of real hot air balloons taking flight and this inspired us to create our own hot air balloons which can be seen flying across our classrooms. Alongside our creative art activities, we have listened to some lovely stories, exploring rhythm and rhyme in the texts including The Train Ride and The Journey. We have practised our listening skills to discriminate between the sound effects of different modes of transport and we have performed some action songs together including The Wheels on the Bus and Sailing Ships using colourful streamers to move rhythmically in time with the music.