One of the huge delights of teaching this age is enjoying, savoring, encouraging, expanding and reveling in the questions that are inevitable to 6 and 7 year-olds' developing understanding. What they want to know covers the gamut of scientific fields: the topics we explore range from physics to biology. To give a few examples:

Physical Sciences.
The children engage in many experiments throughout the year. They are designed to help them understand the various ways that energy can have an effect on matter. From electrical experiments to predictions about water pressure, they provide the opportunities for the skills that are at the center of successful science learning: observing; developing hypotheses; comparing data; and drawing conclusions. All of it, finally, is about theory building.

Biological Sciences.
This year many students are interested in snakes, so we’ll study their habits, habitats, how they get food, and how they protect themselves from predators. With luck we’ll find a herpetologist to visit the class!

Preceding our discussions in Science is the reminder that valuable hypotheses rest on the willingness to be wrong. Questions in these meetings are presented by the teachers and the students. We provide the arena to question what is true; and, increasingly, we give them a language for their wondering and their discoveries. Study topics in physics range from gears and pendulums to sound and light. Our goal is not to promise total understanding: it is to facilitate the beginning of a lifelong gathering of data. A trip to the Discovery Museum will help us explore a range of topics and test a variety of hypotheses.

Science, social studies, literature, art and math--as systems that we use to explain the world to ourselves--are interwoven throughout our curriculum. Each field presents us with skills to be mastered and, fortunately, none stays within its boundaries! Themes and concepts interweave. As one example:

Biographies.
Our lessons will interweave the lives of numerous explorers, inventors, visual and performing artists, and people who have worked for social change. The stories of their lives show how one seemingly small idea can inspire and enrich us all. They provide wonderful examples of the heroism and uncertainties in risking new discoveries.