Teaching Science and its Capabilities

This term, one of my focuses is teaching Science and its capabilities to the children. As a school goal, we want children to know that they are learning science in their classroom, and I am making this my goal so that the children in my class know that we learn science and that we are all scientists. So every Wednesday afternoon, we do science experiments. This might be related to what we have been learning about volcanoes, and I pick a science experiment out of The Kitchen Science Cookbook. The children have been really enjoying the variety of experiments that we have been doing and I think that their ability to describe what they see has been improving compared to prior to this term. We talk about how scientists look closely and make an observation. 

The other thing that I am incorporating into my practice with science is that we are writing about science experiments. This also has been working well as the children are interested and they can describe what happened whereas sometimes it is hard for children to come up with ideas for writing. 

Here is a science planning documentation (evaluation as well). 

I made a wall display for the science learning that we have been doing as I really wanted this to be visible to the children and to know that we are all scientists and we can find out things by being scientists. 

I think I also need to think about being scientists does not happen within the science learning time and this can happen anytime and this is something I need to explore a little more so that the children will understand that we are scientists everyday and anywhere. For example, we can count the number of full stops while reading a big book. We can have a look at some data in the classroom, or why something is happening in a certain way and what that tells us. 

Listening to Georgia talk about the scientist way of thinking, I also think that I need more questionnaires that I can ask children when we are doing the experiments. This is something I can make as a resource. Overall, I am quite happy with what has been happening in terms of science teaching in my class and I would like to continue doing this and extend children's understanding about science and how scientists think and act.