IGP 2020 – Young Master Builders
Agape Little Uni @ Jurong West
In the year 2020, our centre embarked on the Innovation Grant Project (IGP) initiated by Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA). This platform aims to enhance learning experiences for children, promote community engagement and home-centre partnerships as well as to improvise on the existing innovation projects/practices.
We took part in the project entitled “Young Master Builders”, a collaborative effort together with one of the community partners, The Science Centre Board. This project focuses on the Discovery of the World learning domain and aims to equip the preschool teachers with science concepts on stable structures as well as extend children’s interest and curiosity on the design and construction of buildings.
This project involved the participation of the Kindergarten 1 and Kindergarten 2 children together with the effort from Teacher Jen and Teacher Ana, the respective levels form teachers as well as the project coordinators of the IGP for 2020. The children were introduced to concepts such as stability- the basic concept of determining the foundation of various structures.
They explored using a variety of loose parts materials in discovering and determining which items were more reliable to form sturdy and stable structures. Materials used include cue cards, popsicle sticks, wooden pegs, ice-cream sticks, wooden blocks, empty tissue boxes, plastic cups, plastic road tracks and other various manipulatives.
The children also made discovery on the various unique structures and buildings in Singapore such as the Helix Bridge, Henderson Wave bridge, Interlace Condominium, the Pinnacle building and many more. Photo documentations and anecdotal records were consolidated during the project period to make records of children learning processes.
Other than discovering new science concepts through the various experiments, the children took turns to make presentations of their learning process at the end of the project. This helps to also promote and cultivate confidence in them as future confident speakers. The whole learning journey was definitely a new and adventurous learning discovery for the teachers as well as the children!
