For young children science is continuous wondering, finding out, and knowing about the world in which they live. Science is thinking and doing and making the two go together. The raw materials and events of science are all around, at home, in the yard and in the early childhood classrooms and schools.

The pre-k science program is child-centered and activity oriented; it provides children with a variety of experiences in the environment to explore at their own pace and according to their individual cognitive abilities. In their active explorations, children are encouraged to observe carefully, note similarities and differences, make predictions, test out their predictions, ask questions and interact with one another and with the teacher. They are constantly encouraged to think and talk about what they are doing and seeing. The emphasis is the process more than the content alone.

While "sciencing" happens throughout the classroom – in the water table, in the sand table, in the block area, at the hands-on table, setting up a special area with specific learning materials and drawing children's attention to it has many advantages:

• It is much more satisfactory for children to learn about something when they can learn from hand-on involvement
• For the sake of comparison and asking questions, it is generally helpful to provide a kind of contrast of some kind (i.e.: things that sink and float, heavy and light, etc)
• Children learn about observing certain phenomena over a period of time
• Experiments can be repeated and revisited over time

We often integrate science into the classroom by expanding from the "science area." Here are some examples:

• Balancing toys
• Pulleys to carry things from one point to another
• Gutters and ramps to experiment with motion (marbles, water, etc.)

• Finger paint on the easel
• Marble painting
• Magnet painting
• Foot painting
• Printing
• Straw Art

• Cooking projects (especially when children witness transformation by cooking like making butter from whipping cream, or frozen yogurt


• "Orange Food Fest": when children taste all types of "orange food" such as, oranges, carrots, mango, pumpkin, winter squash, cantaloupe, tangerines, orange tomatoes, peaches, apricots, etc. This is a great opportunity to talk about differences and similarities among those items – taste smell, shape, texture, etc.

• How many colors are green? Going on nature walks, collecting evidence that can be studied later, asking questions like, "are there any colors that you can't find in nature?"


• Outdoor scavenger hunt: sometimes, children enjoy finding objects in nature and checking them off a list. Sometimes, they prefer to collect objects and bring them home. Some suggested "Hunt and Find" lists are: textures (objects that are rough, smooth, hard, soft, sharp, bumpy, etc); shapes (round, triangular, square, heart-shaped, cylindrical, star-shaped, etc.); length (find an object that is one hand across, one foot long, waist high, able to fit in your hand, smaller than a finger nail, etc)

• Dressing for the seasons and talking about why we dress in such ways


• Shadow puppets: using a light source, and a large sheet to make a shadow theatre. Children use this opportunity to experiment with size, shape and movement of shadows. They can use three-dimensional objects and observe two-dimensional shadows