Toy Story
As Kindergarten will tell you, kids have always loved toys. They’ve been researching How The World Works, looking at the central idea: Toys allow us to explore and understand our world.
If we take a journey back through history, we’ll see that children have always played with toys. Even though toys have changed throughout the ages, some of them have been around for time immemorial. The earliest toys date back to 4,000BC and were made from natural materials such as bones, rocks, stones and sticks.
As Kindergarten have discovered in their research, children’s toys have evolved in conjunction with the discovery of new materials. Digital technology has given rise to a range of interactive toys, which have revolutionised the way in which children play.
Kindergarten Teacher, Ms Bouterakos explained, “Kindergarten have taken a scientific approach to this unit of inquiry, thinking about which materials are most suited to particular toys and why. They’ve also been investigating how push and pull forces are required for a lot of toys to work. For example, they’ve looked at LEGO, cars, and even how they can manipulate a toy doll.”
As part of their inquiry into push and pull forces, Kindergarten made pom pom poppers, experimenting inside and outside to see how these forces work and what happened when they applied different forces to the pom pom. They then wrote about their experiments.
Next Kindergarten explored the use of parachutes. It made them think about the sort of material that is suitable for a parachute and how push and pull forces work. They thought about sky diving and how gravity pulls a person towards the ground and how a parachute helps to provide a crucial push force to slow their descent. They had lots of fun outside, experimenting with a parachute and testing the air resistance.
Kindergarten then wrote questions, applying their research skills so that they could interview family members and find out more about toys from the past and how they’ve changed over time. They interviewed their parents, grandparents and other family members and reported their findings back to class. The students were fascinated to learn about Cabbage Patch dolls, Care Bears, Rubik’s Cubes and Pogo Sticks.
Over the past week, Kindergarten have been making and designing posters to encourage the rest of the School to donate toys to the Christmas Red Stocking Drive. They used their creative skills to highlight the emotional connection that toys can bring, which is particularly important for children in need.
Kindergarten are now taking a peek inside the toy boxes of different countries and cultures to find out what kids around the world play with, investigating everything from Russian Matyroshka dolls to Guatemalan Worry dolls to Japanese Kendama, a classic cup-and-ball game.
So much learning and so much fun. Well done Kindergarten!