Emerging Biology in the Early Years

How Young Children Learn About the Living World

Sue Dale Tunnicliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351234726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This inspiring text celebrates young children as 'emergent biologists' and explains how their natural inquisitiveness and curiosity can be harnessed to increase early understanding of scientific concepts, and so lay the foundations for future learning about the living world.

Full of practical tips, suggested discussion points and hands-on activities, Emerging Biology in the Early Years is a uniquely child-focussed resource. Chapters provide key information on the physical environment, including weather phenomena and soils, plants, animals and human development, and prioritise the child's perspective to offer activities which are in line with their natural development, thereby provoking discussion, problem-solving and child-led investigations. From planting seeds, to classifying rocks, flowers and animals, to understanding growth processes and recognising anatomical features, this book takes a holistic approach to science which moves beyond the confines of the curriculum and the classroom and shows how biology can be taught in a fun, engaging and inexpensive way both at home and in the early years setting.

Providing a rich collection of ideas, activities, and downloadable sheets, this will be an invaluable resource for early years practitioners and parents looking to develop young children's scientific skills and understanding.

Chapter 1

Beginning to learn about the living world

Introduction

Science is our everyday world. Our planet as we know it was created through Earth science, which has formed our landscapes and flora appropriate to the climates and soils in which animal life, including we, as humans, ultimately evolved. Living things ‘obey’ the laws of physics and are also composed of chemicals. Hence, all science is interlinked. This book focuses on young children’s learning of biological aspects of our living world, but also considers the influence of other sciences.

Types of knowledge

Education is concerned with gaining knowledge in our society. Children, like adults, gain much of their knowledge by direct observation and experience. As such, it is often referred to as ‘conceptual’, or factual and ideas knowledge. ‘Procedural knowledge’, on the other hand, is learnt from other people, such as young children, parents and carers, and other adults with whom children come into contact with at child care, nursery and play groups, as well as in the formal school setting when the child is older. Some aspects are learnt by children through trying things out – hands on activities are frequently called ‘practice’ or ‘skills of science’. Linked with this acquisition is self-regulation and ‘attitudinal knowledge’, and awareness of perseverance and application at tasks and events. Both conceptual and procedural knowledge are also acquired through various forms of media. This is sometimes referred to as ‘testimonial knowledge’. Intuition and the use of our existing knowledge are called ‘inferential knowledge’, and are often applied in children’s investigations, decisions and problem solving.

Play – children’s work

We have long known that play is crucial to child development (Moyles, 1989), and that society should promote awareness of this and work to change incorrect assumptions about play. Whitebread et al. (2012) point out that play is the work of children and is essential for intellectual achievement and emotional wellbeing.

Learning through experience is developed through both spontaneous and directed play, and the introduction of inquiry-based science fits well into extended play activities, progressing to problem-solving challenges. Play is, after all, largely concerned with problem solving (Moyles, 1989). ‘Just playing’ is a phrase that has been used in a derogatory sense by educators, and some parents and other adults, especially those who are unfamiliar with early years learners. Parents, perhaps reflecting on their own education, may assume a negative approach to play and fail to understand its essential and critical value.

Children play from their earliest years – play is how they learn and, initially, many play alone. However, learning is sometimes socially constructed whereby another form of cooperation is required or something has interested another child or an adult. Pretence and make-believe are essential and important aspects of play in a child’s life.

In the development of play children often copy adult behaviours as they learn to separate objects and actions from the real world. They make new interpretations, thereby hypothesising and developing their thinking through imaginative and representational play. If actions are necessary when solving problems, the child gradually learns to work it out in their head, for example, they may use tangible tools and equipment in helping them to learn numeracy, for example matching pairs of blocks or leaves, or recognising different shapes of the same coloured blocks or flowers, or learning spatial words to describe where a certain part of a plant is found.

Spontaneous, free choice and unstructured play is important. Some play is representational with children imitating adult’s behaviours, such as playing in the toy kitchen and making a pretend meal, going through all the actions they have observed. Mimicking in play activities they have seen also brings further learning experiences. Playing at childcare or even at home in a garden, in a mud kitchen, has two functions. It replicates actions they remember seeing elsewhere and also explores the properties of materials, for example mud. They often discover that familiar actions like pouring and stirring can prove to be a different task than that expected according to the material.

Today there is an emphasis on interactive learning as well as sociocultural aspects of learning. Dialogic talk (Alexander, 2008) is encouraged, rather than what might be called a didactic or declarative approach, that is to say, talking facts at learners. Fleer (1992) reminds us that constructivism places importance on determining learners’ existing ideas. Hands-on activities are essential in the learning of science in the early years – scientific explanation does not need to be given, but practical experience of the phenomenon is essential to further learning. At this age, the foundations for observational and planning skills are laid down as well as the process skills such as manipulating items, collection and evaluation. Later on, in a child’s formal science education, these fundamental experiences provide them with an experiential foundation on which to construct the necessary requirement of the curriculum. Children, from their earliest consciousness, observe and investigate. They play. In fact, they need to play (Moyles, 1989). Play can be referred to as messing about, in this case using ‘science actions’ in their play (Their and Linn, 1976).

You might observe young children before they express their thoughts out loud. These emergent, intuitive scientists have hidden questions which guide subsequent activities when further investigating. For example, a baby in a high chair drops something on the floor and observes what happens. In doing so the baby is collecting data through observation, where, very often, someone will return the object to them and they can then repeat the investigation.

Is playing a waste of time? Or is it an essential apprenticeship in developing scientific literacy? Children are often observed during play, which is divisible into experimental investigative play – when they explore phenomena – and narratives – when they are working through a past experience imaginatively or interpreting a story they have heard.

Science, during early childhood, is it more than play? It is serious business. If we fail our children and students in science, the reasons may include lack of appropriate experiences during early childhood.

(Roth, Goulart and Plakitsi, 2013)

Biological knowledge

Early years children achieve their understanding of the world using aspects of all categories of knowledge, as well as learning about themselves as biological beings – from being alive and by feeling hungry for instance. This I would term ‘personal biological knowledge’, and is an important aspect of how we experience our everyday world. We are all members of the biological domain and have personal experiences of being alive, which we extrapolate to other living things in our explanations about them. These explanations and descriptions, known as anthropomorphic comments, are used by children to interpret behaviours and appearances. I have concluded, as have other biologists, for example Ergazaki (2018), that young children have reasoning devices by which they are able to predict aspects of structure and behaviour in other living organisms using what they know about humans from themselves.

Becoming an emergent biologist

In focusing on how very young children acquire biological knowledge in the world around them, and thus become emergent biologists, the basic principles of the scientific processes of observation, classification and inquiry, hypothesis and prediction are used. The logistics of investigating, which is often called planning, include choosing the appropriate items and tools to use for the investigation, and is identifiable in the actions of the youngest child. Having an action plan is crucial and an important life skill. Being able to collect various sorts of data and to say what it means is another desirable skill, as is being able to communicate in different ways, particularly about outcomes and meaning. Acquiring the ability to share, collaborate and work as a team, are crucial aspects of ‘doing’ science, just as there are other aspects of playing and learning. Some are developmental and emerge as a young child grows older, usually at formal school where they can demonstrate this and apply it to other information, particularly to concepts and skills of accepted science. Thus, numeracy and literacy, language and communication, reading and talking are essential tools when learning the concepts and skills of science.

Intuitive scientists

Children are intuitive scientists from birth. The manifestation of science in our world shapes our reality and science has contributed to the technology with which our constructed world largely works (Gopnik, 2009). Like young children, scientists are curious and curiosity is central to discovery – investigating something because they want to know has led to all significant scientific knowledge and progress.

Many have observed, as reinforced by Agar (2017), that entry into a formal school system represses the natural curiosity of young children. Gopnik (2009) found through her work as a psychologist that young children were natural scientists. Tough (1977) listened to pre-school children’s conversations at home in which they were always asking questions. Following the children through school, she found that the questions stopped. The children did not initiate questions, these were instead initiated by the teachers; the child was required to answer and the teacher closed the conversation with a comment, a classic teaching triadic dialogue. However, the work of Tizard and Hughes (1984) found that it was the school setting that also affected the young child’s active questioning. Following the same children from home to school, they found the subsequent lack of questioning of some children depended on how comfortable they felt in school. It is known that young children, once they can speak at around two-and-a-half years of age, start asking questions all the time (British Association Early Childhood Education, 2012, p. 20).

Young children can justify, give reasons, share ideas and hypothesise a rationale for their ideas and actions. This approach is similar to that now advocated in much science teaching, a change from the teacher telling learners facts to learners making investigations, using an inquiry approach and justifying and thinking of the stages involved – a process known as argumentation. Young children often develop this approach spontaneously, but many practitioners are wary of using it (Erduran, Ozedem and Park, 2015).

Questioning

As educators, many of us have also recognised this use of questioning by children once they are in school. The school system seeks to encourage the development of knowledge and skills that are requirements of the statutory curriculum. However, skills advocated for early years children are also skills which are deemed necessary in science learning, hence, achieving one skill means that you achieve all of them, as these skills are easily transferable.

Children are natural storytellers. If you ask a simple question they often reply with a narrative. In science education, this construction of narratives links with a way of talking called argumentation. Essentially, it is the justification of decisions. Although, on occasion, the child will justify their action or identification with a reason, more often the action of an accompanying adult will encourage, through appropriate questions, the development of their child’s thinking. For example, on seeing a different kind of animal for the first time a child is likely to say, for example, that it is a bird. You can ask him why does he think that it is a bird? Usually a child will identify the salient feature of a bird’s behaviour: they notice that the animal is flying. Or children may deem the organism to be a bird because it has feathers, a feature seen in no other animal. Children will name things by recognising their shape and colour from memory, particularly books and animated cartoons they have seen in the media. One day, during one zoo visit, I heard a family deciding that the antelope at which they were looking was in fact a goat because the animal possessed goat characteristics of horns and hooves and explained this to the young children who were with them.

When a child notices organisms, perhaps a plant or animal that piques their interest, if they cannot name it you could ask them what they think it is? What does the organism look like, what does it resemble? What features or behaviours make them think that? In these instances children think ‘what would happen if …?’ and proceed with that action.

Ask children what happens when a stone is lifted from a green patch of grass, revealing a yellow patch instead. Why is it yellow, not green? What do they think has happened? Ask probing questions, ‘What is the green grass having that the grass under the stone doesn’t have?’ Ask them to find out if that always happened and what they could do to test their ideas. Argumentation has become one of the key aspects of science in formal schooling but beginning with a child’s justifying statements is an excellent start.

Narratives

Narratives are a key aspect of early years education. Pictorial books may use science that is fanciful; it may be accurate but most often it is a blend of both fact and fiction, depending on the story. A science-based narrative is part of the literary narrative which children quickly learn to identify. ‘Doing’ science also creates a narra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1. Beginning to learn about the living world
• 2. Learning about ourselves
• 3. Learning about other animals
• 4. Learning about plants
• 5. Observing changes in living things
• 6. Naming living things
• 7. Earth science: Rocks, soil, weather and habitats
• 8. Interactions between physical science and living things
• Index