Science
What is Science?
Through fostering children’s sense of wonder around science, Early Years aims to enhance curiosity, enthusiasm, exploration, and understanding. The experiences and outcomes surrounding science are organised into four key areas:
Planet Earth: Children learn about the natural world and their place in it. They observe and explore features of their environment, such as weather, seasons, and living things; investigating concepts of growth, decay, and the interdependence of living organisms.
Forces, Electricity & Waves: Introduces basic concepts of force, electricity, and waves, exploring simple machines, ramps and leavers, and the way that they affect objects. They may investigate electrical circuits using safe and age-appropriate materials. Additionally, they will explore light and sound, including ways they can be produced and changed.
Biological Systems: Children explore and investigate living organisms, their basic needs, and life processes. This involves learning about different types of animals, plants, as mini beasts, including their characteristics and required habitats. Through observing, learning about, and caring for plants and animals, children develop understanding of life cycles, and foster a sense of responsibility.
Materials: Learning about different materials and their properties, children can develop abilities to identify and describe materials based on their characteristics, such as: colour, texture, and flexibility. They may conduct simple experiments to explore ways in which a material’s properties can change, such as mixing materials or observing the effects of heat and cold.
These four areas provide a foundation for children’s scientific understanding, emphasising hands-on, experiential learning that support active exploration and questioning to support children to make sense of the world around them.
Why is Science important?
Within Early Years, Science is considered important for a variety of reasons:
Development of Curiosity & Enquiry Skills: Through encouraging children to be curious, ask questions, and explore the world around them, they can develop skills of enquiry, such as: observing, predicting, and investigating. These lay the foundation for critical thinking, problem-solving, and scientific reasoning.
Understanding the Natural World: Science enables young children to develop understanding of the natural world and their place within it. Learning about features of the environment, seasons, weather patterns, and the diversity of living organisms, children can make sense of their surroundings and develop appreciation for the interconnectedness of all living things.
Development of Scientific Literacy: Essential for informed decision-making scientific literacy helps children understand concepts of cause and effect, patterns, and systems. This lays the groundwork for future learning in science related disciplines.
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving: Children learn to observe, hypothesise, test ideas, and draw conclusions based on observations and evidence. These skills are transferable and valuable across multiple areas of their lives beyond science.
Encouraging Respect & Care for the Environment: Children develop an appreciation for the environment and the need to care for it. They learn about sustainability, the impact of their actions on the natural world and the importance of responsible stewardship. This fosters a sense of responsibility that empowers children to make informed choices surrounding their contribution to a sustainable future.
Integration with Other Curricular Areas: Science provides opportunity for language development, mathematical reasoning, and understanding societal and environmental issues. Through making connections across different areas, children can see the relevance of science in their everyday lives.
How can I support learning surrounding Science?
When supporting children’s engagement with science, quality interactions and the use of curiosity provoking questions are key. These include: wondering out loud, asking open-ended questions that encourage children to make predictions, and providing opportunity for creative problem-solving to foster deeper understanding.
Typical questions include: “what might happen if”, “why do you think that happened?” and “can you think of a way”.
Scientific understanding can be supported via the facilitation of opportunities for children to explore, experiment, extend curiosity, and experience the awe and wonder resulting from making discoveries about the world around them,
Ample opportunity and adequate time should be afforded to children for hands-on exploration, observations, and experimentation with a variety of materials, objects, and natural processes.
Practitioners’ enthusiasm, excitement, higher-order questions, and respect for the time that it takes for scientific processes to occur is critical to stimulating children’s intrigue and excitement surrounding scientific concepts and processes.
Resources to support scientific exploration are generally included across different areas of the core provision and within the natural world.
