My friend Allison , over at No Time For Flash Cards, is dedicating a whole week to supporting science in the preschool classroom and home. I’m honored she invited me to kick it off by laying the foundation for what science is.
I knew exactly which quote I would use to define it:
“Whereas many adults think of science as a discrete body of knowledge, for young children science is finding out about the everyday world that surrounds them. This is exactly what they are interested in doing, all day, every day. In the preschool classroom or in the university research laboratory, science is an active and open-ended search for new knowledge. It involves people working together in building theories, testing those theories, and then evaluating what worked, what didn’t, and why.”
(And here’s my favorite part…)
“Science itself is not an activity, but an approach to doing an activity. This approach involves a process of inquiry – theorizing, hands-on investigation, and discussion.”
(Source: Kathleen Conezio, MS and Lucia French, PhD , Capitalizing on Children’s Fascination with the Everyday World to Foster Language and Literacy Development. Young Children, September 2002)
Read my whole post here and follow along for the entire week at No Time For Flash Cards here.
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