Children enjoy water play, and kindergarten children can learn about the water cycle. Teachers are already introducing elements of the water cycle when discussing weather and bodies of water. The water cycle also can be a springboard for teaching children about plants and animals and the importance of water for sustaining life and shaping our…

When children actively engage with classroom content, they are generally more interested and better invested in what they are learning, and better learning outcomes will likely ensue. However, it is challenging to design classroom activities that scaffold scientific reasoning while meaningfully and significantly involving students. In this…

All writing begins with ideas, but young students often need visual cues to help them organize their thoughts before beginning to write. For this reason, many elementary teachers use graphic organizers or thinking maps to help students visualize patterns and organize their ideas within the different genres of writing. Graphic organizers such as…

Some of children's earliest explorations focus on movement of their own bodies. Quickly, children learn to further explore movement by using objects like a ball or car. They recognize that a ball moves differently than a pushed block. As they grow, children enjoy their experiences with motion and movement, including making objects move, changing…

"Feeding up" establishes a substantive line of inquiry that compels learners to engage in investigation and inquire. It also forms the basis for the assessments that follow. Once students understand the purpose and begin to work, they receive "feedback" that is timely and scaffolds their understanding. Based on their responses, the teacher gains a…

Carefully crafted experiences in the early childhood classroom can create learning opportunities for children that allow one curiosity to lead to another. Learning how to find out answers to fascinating questions is what science is all about. In fact, it can be as simple as learning how an ordinary egg can be changed. For the past year, the…

Like peanut butter and jelly, kindergarteners and dinosaurs go well together. Therefore, the authors developed a cross-curricular unit based on the books "All Aboard the Dinotrain" (Lund and Fine 2006) and "Dinosailors" (Lund and Fine 2003). Dinosaur learning centers were used to engage students and address the National Science Education Standards…

Learning about what inferences are, and what a good inference is, will help students become more scientifically literate and better understand the nature of science in inquiry. Students in K-4 should be able to give explanations about what they investigate (NSTA 1997) and that includes doing so through inferring. This article provides some tips…