Science – Children are natural scientists.  Let them MESS with things in a classroom filled with tools and bugs and plants and machines. 

Science for Infants and Babies is touching leaves and feeling the sun on their faces; for Toddlers it is squeezing water out of sponges; for Threes, Fours, and Fives it is figuring out what happens if and what happens next. 

Meal and snack times are PURE science.  Fill water and sand tables with mud, dirt, sand, rice, beans, seeds, cornstarch, clays, packing peanuts, cloth, cardboard, paper, shaving cream, gelatin.  Encourage research and experimentation rather than answering questions.  Ask them questions that encourage guessing, estimating, and predicting.  Science skills include using the scientific process using the tools of science, and grasping basic facts about biology, zoology, botany, geology, meteorology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and space.

To DAP Science:

• Equip the classroom and campus with developmentally appropriate materials and equipment intended for the building of the strengths of the scientific process (curiosity, exploration, observation, discovery, experimentation, and  invention), such as collections of natural objects (leaves, shells, rocks, wood); living things (plants or a garden area, insects, ant farms, butterfly habitats);tools and props (magnets, magnifiers, sensory games, thermometers, tweezers, microscopes, rain gauges); and books, games and other written material with realistic pictures, photos, and drawings that tell facts and give accurate information about nature and manmade objects.
• Offer daily experiences with enough time and freedom allowed for children to physically (and often messily) work with natural and manmade objects and experiences with the sand/water table with a variety of media for pouring, measuring, and manipulating with the senses.
• Offer language to describe objects, pictures, situations, and events dealing with biology, zoology, botany, meteorology, geology, physics, engineering (buildings, machines) and space.
• Incorporate science into every facet of the daily activities including the routine elements of the day such as transitions, meal and snack times, playground time, art, and music and movement classes.
• Create an environment which values children’s attempts to figure things out through active exploration, observation, discovery, experimentation, and invention through trial and error and creative ‘out of the box’ thinking.  Encourage, accept, respect children’s ideas and reward them with attention.
• Create an environment which values science and encourages the desire to use a scientific approach to learning without pressure or developmentally inappropriate measures and devices such as  and worksheets, and reinforces the openness of the need for young children to actively and messily manipulate objects in order to learn from them.

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science”- Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science

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