Gingerbread Man Mystery: A Sweet Start to Community Exploration

In Kindergarten we have begun our second unit of inquiry learning about how we organise ourselves.  This is a wonderful unit in which we explore the roles and responsibilities of different members of our community.  The unit began by us reading the Gingerbread Man. The students were excited to make their own cut out gingerbread men.  We put them on display outside our classroom

To our shock, we discovered that our gingerbread men ran away and were no longer where we had put them!  

We came up with lots of theories as to what had happened to the gingerbread me and decided the best thing to do would be to go on a hunt to find them!  We found our gingerbread men in all sorts of different places, including the councillor’s office, the security guard’s station as well as the High School teachers’ classrooms!  This activity has sparked the children’s interest in finding more about the different people they have met on the hunt. 

Kindergarten Quest: Interviewing Community Figures

As the unit develops Kindergarten students will think about questions about what the would like to know about the new members of the community they met.  They will then go and interview them to find out their roles and responsibilities in our school community. 

One of the most rewarding aspects of this unit is seeing the students confidence develop as they interview different adults.  They also develop their social skills as they learn how to conduct themselves appropriately in different environments. This unit really is a wonderful way to develop relationships between the students and different staff at SIS, building  and nurturing the community atmosphere that we all love.