Science Sunday: Preschool Science

I’m going to flesh this post out more after church, but I know many of you pop in first thing Sunday morning to link up, and I wanted to give you a place to come to.

One of the most common questions/comments I get is: I’d love to link up, but I’ve got a pre-schooler, I can’t wait until they’re older.  Well, today’s post is going to be for you.  It’s all about preschool science.

To be honest when you have a young child, almost anything can be brought in as science, because they are learning so many different skills.

For the youngest child, all of those sensory bins where they are exploring textures.  Gift of Curiosity linked up a great example last week, teaching your toddler about hard vs. soft.  This builds skills for the future, good scientists describe what they are seeing and feeling.  They use their sense, so if you start building their vocabulary from a young age, you are building the keys to a good scientist.

When they are old enough not to put things in their mouths, let them explore combining liquids, and other properties.  This is the time to let them play with baking soda and vinegar.  Let them make concoctions (like in the post above from Angelic Scalliwags), have them play outside where it doesn’t make a difference if it’s messy.  If that’s not an option, put down a drop cloth and let them play.  Teach them to how to play and not completely cover the floor, but still have fun.

This also lets them learn how to pour in a gradual way, slowly they learn how to pour without spilling, so when you are trying chemistry experiments, that’s not a worry.

Teach them how to sort things, here we worked on sorting seeds, it was a great fine motor activity, and let them learn how to visually see the differences.

Teach them how to categorize things and be able to defend their answer.  One week we studied farms, a common preschool theme, and then I had them categorize all of our farm toys and explain why they organized them that way.  This gets some higher order thinking skills going, again it’s done in a way that your kids are learning, but they’re not feeling overwhelmed.

Answer questions, when they ask you why do we get puddles, find out the answer, and explain it to them, show it to them, check out books from the library.

That’s where most of our science came from when they were in preschool, their questions

Act it out, learn about animal behaviors and act it out.  This is one of my kids favorite activities, imitate animals.  Find insects and bring them into your house for a time and study it, then let it go.  Have fun with it.

The biggest thing for preschool science, make it fun.  Show them how to learn through play.

For a quick reference, here’s a few blogs that regularly link up with preschool ideas:

Learning and Growing the Piwi Way

Buggy and Buddy

Trillium Monetssori

Gift of Curiosity

Angelic Scalliwags

All 5 of these blogs have linked up in the past month with some great activities to do with your preschoolers.  The past several weeks there have been some really great preschool activities, so check out what’s linked up each week, there is almost always an idea you can easily adapt to your young kids.

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