Wow! I cannot believe that we are nearing the end of our second transdisciplinary theme: who we are! It has been a wonderful and insightful learning experience to see how all the pieces of the central idea of: healthy choices influence well- being implemented in the classroom. The progression of skills and content taught from the beginning of the unit to now has been extremely rewarding. The growth in my students’ confidence as well as their ability to act as inquirers and ask the deeper questions has been incredible. Even at this young age they were able to demonstrate their understanding of the content covered. I saw first hand how the transdisciplinary themes are often transferable to other specialty subjects such as Physical Education and French. For example, this past week my students were organizing pictures of foods written in French into the four food groups.
I had the opportunity to help deliver part of a summative assessment for my K class and it demonstrated to me how much knowledge my students were able to gain with this unit. Although our class learned that to stay healthy they must also keep their minds healthy through relaxation and mediation, I noticed that during the summative when questioned, students tended to gravitate towards commenting on exercise and eating healthy. As result of my observation, I am more aware that I should stress mental health equally as important and I am still curious as to how? I know I will have to pursue this further. The final question that students were asked was “What would happen if you did not make these healthy choices?” Some students were able to make connections with the International Baccalaureate (IB) learner profile, as one response was that if you did not exercise, relax or eat healthy you would not be “balanced.” This highlights how quickly even at the kindergarten level students are able to acquire the IB language.
Our cohort has discussed the importance of making the transdisciplinary theme, lines of inquiry and concepts more visible to our students. In our classroom we have a bulletin board entirely devoted to the inquiry cycle and while teaching we can refer to it so our students see the cycle of tuning in, finding out, sorting out and going further with their learning. This bulletin board visibly demonstrates the stages that our students experienced throughout this unit and was a daily reminder of the progression in their learning. I have discovered that in kindergarten there is so much to learn that at times it can be quite a task to cover the central theme, lines of inquiry and learner profile, in addition to learning the alphabet, counting and reading. I am curious as to how we attain an appropriate balance? I anticipate that this will come by learning how to put all the pieces together, along with practice, more practice, and experience!
