The Young Child As Scientist

Young children - how they experience the world, interact with each other, pose questions and problems, and construct knowledge - form the basis for this insightful examination of early childhood science education. Authors Chaille and Britain explore the teacher's role in understanding and facilitating preschool and primary-school children's scientific explorations. Using three traditional content areas of science - chemistry, physics, and biology - and translating them into developmentally appropriate practices, The Young Child as Scientist leaves behind rigid views of science education. Both teachers and students of early childhood education are led to reconceptualize science in ways that have implications for their whole classroom. Without being a cookbook approach to curriculum planning or a purely theoretical approach, the text weaves practical examples and theory together to present constructivism as it can be implemented in real preschool and elementary classrooms.

Young children - how they experience the world, interact with each other, pose questions and problems, and construct knowledge - form the basis for this insightful examination of early childhood science education. Authors Chaille and Britain explore the teacher's role in understanding and facilitating preschool and primary-school children's scientific explorations. Using three traditional content areas of science - chemistry, physics, and biology - and translating them into developmentally appropriate practices, The Young Child as Scientist leaves behind rigid views of science education. Both teachers and students of early childhood education are led to reconceptualize science in ways that have implications for their whole classroom. Without being a cookbook approach to curriculum planning or a purely theoretical approach, the text weaves practical examples and theory together to present constructivism as it can be implemented in real preschool and elementary classrooms.

Funny and totally true childhood biographies and full-color illustrations tell tales from the challenging yet defining growing-up years of Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall, Marie Curie, and 12 other brilliant scientists. Every great scientist started out as a kid. Before their experiments, inventions, and discoveries that changed the world, the world's most celebrated scientists had regular-kid problems just like you. Stephen Hawking hated school, and preferred to spend his free time building model airplanes, inventing board games, and even building his own computer. Jane Goodall got in trouble for bringing worms and snails into her house. And Neil deGrasse Tyson had to start a dog-walking business to save up money to buy a telescope. Kid Scientists tells the stories of a diverse and inclusive group—also including Temple Grandin, Nikola Tesla, Ada Lovelace, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Rosalind Franklin, Sally Ride, Rachel Carson, George Washington Carver, and Vera Rubin—through kid-friendly texts and full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page.

What is science for a child? How do children learn about science and how to do science? Drawing on a vast array of work from neuroscience to classroom observation, Taking Science to School provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade. By looking at a broad range of questions, this book provides a basic foundation for guiding science teaching and supporting students in their learning. Taking Science to School answers such questions as: When do children begin to learn about science? Are there critical stages in a child's development of such scientific concepts as mass or animate objects? What role does nonschool learning play in children's knowledge of science? How can science education capitalize on children's natural curiosity? What are the best tasks for books, lectures, and hands-on learning? How can teachers be taught to teach science? The book also provides a detailed examination of how we know what we know about children's learning of scienceâ€"about the role of research and evidence. This book will be an essential resource for everyone involved in K-8 science educationâ€"teachers, principals, boards of education, teacher education providers and accreditors, education researchers, federal education agencies, and state and federal policy makers. It will also be a useful guide for parents and others interested in how children learn.

As more schools begin to implement the National Science Education Standards, adults who care about the quality of K-12 science education in their communities may want to help their local schools make the transition. This booklet provides guidance to parents and others, explains why high-quality science education is important for all children and young adults, and shows how the quality of school science programs can be measured. Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education Staff; 1998, 32 pages, 8.5 x 11, single copy, $10.00; 2-9 copies, $7.00 each; 10 or more copies, $4.50 each (no other discounts apply).

Field-tested across the country, this comprehensive curriculum expands and extends the role science has traditionally played in the early childhood classroom. The first in a new series, Discovering Nature with Young Children explores the wide-ranging elements that make up the natural world around us. The curriculum replaces simple fact-feeding practices with the development of long-term scientific reasoning, including literacy skills and numeracy skills, such as hypothesis, inference, prediction, and estimation.