Despite the growing influence of the "material" turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children's classroom relations "and" our own…

Evolution is the integrative framework of the life sciences. Even though the topic is often not formally introduced before high school, young children already have various ideas about evolutionary principles (variation, inheritance, and selection) and their underlying key concepts (e.g., differential fitness, reproduction, and speciation).…

The activity described here was designed to center on the observation of circadian rhythms in plants through the example of growing beans. The aim was to develop students' skills of systematic observation of various variables in the long-term. Our study took place at a Science and Arts Center with 17 gifted students in the third and fourth grades…

This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine content-area literacy instruction in comparison to a science-infused literacy instruction (SILI) to determine how these two approaches influenced 2nd grade students' ability to read and write science informational text and the students' attitude and motivation towards reading. After professional…

This research aims to design and apply a lesson plan to satisfy 3rd-grade inclusive education students' individual learning needs on the subject of plant life cycle, and to develop three instruction materials based on this lesson plan. In the first stage of this three-staged research, visually impaired students' individual learning needs were…

This study examines the drawings that 178 young children carried out on two different occasions separated by a period of one year to explain their understanding of the plant world. The pictorial content of the drawings was analysed in accordance to the categories that previous research has proved to be useful when it comes to gaining an insight…

This study aimed to support the development of the scientific observation skills of children at an early age using a pattern selected from nearby nature. For this purpose, a simple, innovative and authentic observation activity was designed using thorny burnet ("Sarcopoterium spinosum" L.), a plant unique to the Mediterranean region. The…

Against a backdrop of advocacy for interdisciplinary STEM curricula, this paper explores the design principles underpinning a three-year longitudinal research project that develops and evaluates interdisciplinary mathematics and science learning sequences involving multiple teachers and student cohorts across the primary school years. The research…

Most plants are able to obtain all of the nutrients that they need from air, water, and soil; however, this is not true of carnivorous plants. Because they tend to live in boggy soils where there are small amounts of nitrogen, carnivorous plants have developed specialized structures that enable them to lure and capture insects and sometimes other…

Young children love to draw, and should be encouraged to explore drawing as a communication tool. Drawing is a means by which children can express their thoughts, interests and feelings, long before they learn to write. We know that: "children's drawings are vehicles for expression and communication" (Chang, 2012, p. 187). This form of…