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Pint-Sized Science!
By Sandy Fleming


Welcome to "Pint-Sized Science!" Together, we will explore experiments, activities and hands-on games to make science fun. Science education is a vital part of young children's learning, and you can make a difference by devoting some time each week to exploration.

There are several reasons to make science a priority in your program or home. Science activities build a better understanding of the world around us. Your experiments and activities will add to children's general knowledge. Science also encourages many logical thinking skills. Prediction, sequencing, cause and effect, and drawing conclusions are all part of a sound science activity. These activities also build those all-important language skills, as excited and motivated children describe their observations and put their theories into words.

Children are born scientists. In the course of your work with children, haven't you heard questions like, "Why is the sky blue?" and "What's under the ground?" and "Where did the moon come from?"

Children are curious creatures and have a strong desire to find out the answers to the questions that occur to them. In addition, in our fast-paced world, children will need the best understanding of science that we can give them. Without our help, children will not be ready to take their place in our technology-based world. Caregivers and parents have the opportunity to help children build a positive, capable self-image. Building a habit of life-long learning must begin as early in life as possible. We can lay a vital groundwork for later success in many areas of science competence. Your enthusiasm and excitement can encourage a child to become a life-long investigator who feels the answers he or she needs are available and just around the corner.

What does science for children look like? Many people have the mistaken impression that science is overwhelmingly complicated, that it takes a lot of special training and equipment to teach, and that it is too hard for children to learn. The basis for most of these misconceptions is the mistaken view that science is a collection of facts and information. Instead, think of science as more of a process. Science is something to be done instead of "learned" or "accomplished."

Science has four basic steps, and children "do" them all the time, even without our help! Science is observing, predicting, testing and putting bits of information together to explain what the other steps showed. Even babies follow those four steps every day as they learn to make sense of their world. Small children observe an event that catches their interest, they consider and predict what might happen, then test out their theory (sometimes over and over and over and...) and finally create their own explanation that fits with their experience and knowledge.

So, science is NOT about giving out answers, or even trying to learn facts in any special order. Science IS developing and growing an evermore complete understanding of the world and how it works. Your job, as parent or caregiver, is more of a guide than a teacher. If you provide interesting events, the children will take it from there. You can encourage them to observe, to predict, to devise ways to test their predictions, and help them fit their observations into an expanding understanding of the workings of our world.

The National Center for Improving Science Education has created a list of nine scientific concepts that it feels children need to understand. These include:

*Organization: Ideas can be organized and classified. Young children classify by sorting by color, size or shape. Different classification systems can be used for the same group of objects.

*Cause and Effect: Nature is predictable, and things do not happen without causes. Much of science for young children is the search for causes and the observation of effects.

Systems: Parts go together to make a whole.

Scale: It is important to learn to measure, count and quantify.

Models: Older children can learn by creating pictures and models of their observations.

*Change: Everything in nature changes. Some changes occur fast enough to watch while others must be noticed over a period of time.

Structure and Function: There is a relationship between the way objects look (feel, smell, sound and taste) and the things they do.

Variation: Everything in the world has a set of properties and characteristics that can be learned.

*Diversity: Young children can learn very early that every situation contains a whole variety of interesting organisms. Diversity is a necessary part of our world.

The items marked with an asterisk are considered to be the concepts that are most important to include in programs for young children. You will find, however, that many of the other concepts are appropriate as well. You may automatically include measurement concepts in your sorting activity, for example.

For more information and more detailed learning goals, you can refer to the National Science Education Standards. These can be found online.

And here's some science fun to get things rolling! This activity/demonstration could be called "Soap Power." You will need an index card, scissors, a container of water (like a dishpan or sink), and liquid dish soap. Start by cutting a boat shape from the index card. You know, pointy on one end and square on the other end. The sides should be rounded, like a boat's real shape. Make it about two and a half inches long and one and a half inches wide. Cut a notch out of the straight back end.

Now, place the boat gently into the water. Squirt some soap into the notch at the end of the boat. Discuss what happens. When you've heard the children's ideas and discussed them, you can explain the show this way: Water molecules stick together tightly and create a "skin" on top of the water (called surface tension). The soap breaks that skin and pushes the boat forward.

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Sandy Fleming is an educator, author and workshop facilitator. She resides in southern Michigan with her husband and three daughters. Sandy leads workshops for daycare providers and parents in the region, tutors students, volunteers for Girl Scouts and her church, and teaches online classes for adults and children. She loves to make new friends, so please drop her an e-mail at kids@busyparentsonline.com

 
 
 
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