British Science Week 2023
Connections
10th to 19th March 2023
Blog 4 - Where to start with developing a STEM curriculum in the early years?
In the early years at the moment there is an exciting buzz (although sometimes daunting) about what is your curriculum and developing your own curriculum. This has been the increasing emphasis since the introduction of the revised Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in 2021. Compiled with the ever demanding pressure of Ofsted who want to see early yeas settings delivering an ambitious curriculum, which is regularly referred to in the Early Years Inspection Framework 2021.
After what feels like many years of a potentially interpreted system of you must do x-y-z as you curriculum, the power has been returned now to early years practitioners. Highlighting in particular that the focus is not solely on the EYFS development matters statements, or indeed that learning happens only with the designated areas of learning in the EYFS. Rather we know see the EYFS educational programs (areas of learning) as the bare bones and our job is to put the meat on the bones. But also remembering that settings curriculum’s that are ambitious are unique, tailored to the individual children’s interests, motivations and learning.
This is a fantastic opportunity to reflect on your settings curriculum and incorporate or focus on STEM education as part of your unique and ambitious curriculum that you offer your children. That builds upon the seven areas of development and the characteristics of effective learning and teaching. We appreciate that this power might feel daunting and you may be unsure of where to start, so we are sharing with you three tips to developing your STEM curriculum to get you started.
Tip One - Develop Curriculum Outcomes
My first recommendation is to think of curriculum outcomes in relation to STEM skills and knowledge, that you would like to see children develop by the time they leave your setting. When we think about what curriculum is in it’s simplest definition curriculum is what we want children to learn in the time that they are with us.
STEM skills are those foundational skills that children need to develop in order to be able to reach their full potential or engage in STEM education. Such as learning to problem-solve, test ideas, observe, talk and share their ideas with others, hypothesize, work in collaboration, resilience, to be able to think of ideas, be innovative, being curious, being methodical and so on.
STEM knowledge is specific information we want children to gain in relation to STEM. For example, this might be developing an understanding of growth, change and decay. Learning the life cycle of a butterfly. Or about capacity, gravity, magnitude, electricity and so on.
A STEM curriculum goal example
To be able to talk and share their observations with their peers and adults about what happens to plants over a period of time; demonstrating an understanding of plant life cycles, growth, decay and change.
Tip Two - Outline the Steps Children Take to Reach Curriculum Outcomes
When we think about children’s learning, it is often a journey where children go through different stages before they get to the end goal of our curriculum. So it is really helpful to think about what are those stages that children go through in order to meet that goal. Take some time as a team to discuss child development, your knowledge of your children and how you can break the learning down into smaller steps to get to the end goal.
Steps to consider when breaking down curriculum goals
Physical development.
Personal, social and emotional development.
Communication and language.
What prior knowledge do the need to reach the end goal?
Curriculum Goal Example: To be able to talk and share their observations with their peers and adults about what happens to plants over a period of time; demonstrating an understanding of plant life cycles, growth, decay and change.
Under twos - to develop their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination to enable them to help plant plants and water them. To use key words relating to life cycle e.g. small, big, grow, seed, plant.
Two to threes - to be able to look after their plants with support and help e.g. watering plants. To use simple sentences to relay their observations about plants and seeds. E.g. “It got bigger!” To develop their observational skills through a variety of sensory play and activities (to support their knowledge understanding and language development for talking about what they observe).
Three to Four Year olds -Talk about and retell the life cycle of a plant to peers/adults. To show care and concern for their plants and begin to understanding what they need. e.g. sunshine, water etc. To listen and respond appropriately to others as they share ideas.
*Please note that this is not inclusive of all the skills that children might need to learn the overall curriculum goal outlined and that this is based in a curriculum that already offers a firm foundation of learning opportunities across the 3 prime areas of development. These are communication and language development, personal, social and emotional development and physical development, that will underpin and lay the foundations for a well-rounded STEM curriculum.
Tip Three - Develop a Bank of Ideas
For each of your curriculum goals and steps that children will go through on their journey to reaching the mail goal , it can be really helpful to develop a bank of ideas. This is because especially when starting something new we might need to look for ideas and inspirations, it might not come naturally to us in the moment. Or if you are anything like I was we can easily full into the habit of doing the same thing, because it worked before and by having a bank of ideas it encourages us to try new ideas and offer more of a breadth of experiences.
Example bank of ideas to support curriculum goal
Vegetable patch,
Cress monsters,
Activities to develop observational skills, - e.g. gloop, dancing raisins experiment, colour mixing activities,
Life cycle books and activities,
Observational still life painting/drawing.
“The best learning comes through experience, play and hands on opportunities. If we want to learn about how a seed turns into a tomato, let’s explore the seeds, plant the seeds, nurture them and watch them grow. I strongly believe children are not passive in their learning, they are active involved and making meaningful connections through doing.”
Want to find out more or join our upcoming training, ‘Developing Your STEM Curriculum in the Early Years? We would love for you to join us and have more information below.
British Science Week 2023
Our third blog in our series for British Science Week 2023 is looking at how we can support scientific learning through participating in cooking and baking activities with children in the early years. Cooking with children is a great way of support scientific learning, from making observations, working collaboratively and developing their language skills…
Connections
10th - 19th March 2023
Blog 3 - The opportunities for scientific learning through cooking activities.
Our third blog in our series for British Science Week 2023 is looking at how we can support scientific learning through participating in cooking and baking activities with children in the early years. Cooking with children is a great way of support scientific learning, from making observations, working collaboratively and developing their language skills. To support specific knowledge applied to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics); through hands-on practical life experiences. For example, measuring ingredients whilst cooking, learning about cause and effects, liquids and solids, changes in materials and so on.
Baking Bread with Children
Baking bread with children in early years settings used to be one of my all time favourite cooking activities to do. It is rich with supporting so many areas of learning across the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage), from working on those physical skills, hand-eye coordination, muscles development in arms and hands for writing, to supporting mathematical learning whilst they measure ingredients. But additionally baking bread is great for children who are learning about changes over time and cause and effect. As they learn to make observations and talk about what they see, for example, the dough rising (or growing) before popping it in the oven. The change between the dough and the cooked bread. There are lots of opportunities here for children to develop those all important STEM skills that we talk about and make connections between their observations.
Or the simple observations of the reaction that happens with yeast, warm water and sugar. Have you ever mixed your yeast with warm water in a bottle and placed a balloon over the end to see what happens? As the yeast reacts with the sugar, it lets of the gas of carbon dioxide and inflates the balloon. Find out more here.
Connections and Cooking
This years theme for British Science Week is connections. Learning about food is a great way for children to make connections in their everyday discoveries. Everyone needs food and food can be a fantastic way of opening the doors to many other areas of learning and development. For example, the British Science Week Activity Pack shares an early years activity idea for how does food get to our plate. Click here to learn more.
Cooking with children is a great way to open up discussion around food, where does it come from? How do we make the flour to go into our cakes? An endless amount of questions and opportunities that can be extended in a variety of ways from learning about how a flour mill works to planting your own vegetables in the garden to use whilst cooking. This is one of the fantastic things in the early years, we can ask those questions alongside the children, become curious learners with them and develop our own ideas.
As well as the endless connections children are going to develop whilst participating in cooking activities and learning about the ingredients, carrots are hard - tomatoes are soft. Learning about how sugar dissolves in warm water, or how mixtures change over time e.g. a cake mixture goes from a liquid consistency to a solid. What an amazing awe moment for a 2 year old? They are physically learning so much about cause and effect through these activities.
2 More Things to Try Cooking this British Science Week
Chocolate Shredded Wheat Nests
Observe and talk about:
What happens to the chocolate when it gets warm?
Why is the chocolate melting?
What will happen if we put them in the fridge?
What happens to the chocolate when it cools down?
Vegetable Soup
Observe and talk about:
Where do all the vegetables used come from?
Talk about vegetable properties, how do they grow?
Talk about what happens to the vegetables as you cook them.
How does the soup change in consistency?
British Science Week 2023
Children are naturally curious and as Piaget often referred to children as mini-scientists. All of our children have questions inside them that they love to ask and are naturally interested in the why and how things work or happen in the world around them. When thinking about this years topic for BSW23 of connections I think that this is such an important part of how children learn and develop in general; because learning in its very simplistic form is us making connections between different pieces of knowledge that we are obtaining.
Connections
10th to 19th March 2023
Blog 2 - Connections - Starting with a question to support child-led learning and the influences of the High Scope approach plan-do-review on child-led learning.
Our second blog post for British Science Week 2023 (#BSW23) is looking at how we can start with a question to support scientific learning in the early years. We will also be exploring aspects of child-led learning, as they develop their own questions and we work with children to support this area of enquiry led learning. And think about the lessons we can learn to support scientific learning from the influential work of the High Scopes approach of plan-do-review with children.
Starting With a Question
Children are naturally curious and Piaget often referred to children as mini-scientists. All of our children have questions inside them that they love to ask and are naturally interested in the why and how things work or happen in the world around them. When thinking about this years topic for BSW23 of connections I think that this is such an important part of how children learn and develop in general; because learning in its very simplistic form is us making connections between different pieces of knowledge that we are obtaining.
Piaget often referred to this process as schematic learning and how we develop schemas of knowledge. These are the up to date ideas, knowledge and information that we hold about the world around us. Often in the early years we talk about schemas as the way in which children make sense of the world around them, Because we see repeated actions in their play, for example, a child within the trajectory schema will be exploring throwing, often drop things from a highchair, explore the movement of themselves and objects both vertically and horizontally. This is the way that there brains are making connections and learning about the all important world around them,
This is a recorded version available for teams or individuals of our popular webinar, ‘Again, Again, Again: Schema’s in the Early Years’ for those who cannot attend a live event.
Have you ever wondered why children do certain things again and again? This interactive webinar explores schematic learning, when children repeat certain patterns of behaviour over and over again. We aim to support parents and practitioners in identifying the schema’s that their children may be in and ways to support the different schema’s in our environment, activities and play opportunities.
As a constructivist Piaget spoke about the process of accommodation, assimilation and reaching equilibrium as we build on our schemas of knowledge about the world around us. I often think of schemas as boxes of knowledge/information. When we are assimilating these boxes (schemas) it is changing the information that we already have, where as accommodation is creating a new box (or schematic structure) of information to build with because something does not fit in with our pre-existing ideas. This then help’s us to reach a status of equilibrium, where there is no conflict between previous and new pieces of knowledge and information.
Tuning into children’s questions that they have about the world around them and how things work, is a fantastic way of exploring connections with young children. Whether that be questions that they have verbalised, such as, “Why is a tiger different to a cheetah?”. Or it is discovered through our careful observations of children’s learning and development that leads to supporting children’s enquiry-based learning through our careful interactions and enabling environments. For example, we have noticed that Tommy has been sat with the clipboard and the toy cars and is placing the cars at the top, watching them go down and saying “wow!”. We might extend this to support more child-led learning, for example, adding in different materials to make ramps e.g. pieces of wood or cardboard. We might add non-standard units for measuring etc. But we are following the child’s interest and lead throughout the activity.
Child-Led Learning
Maria Montessori was a key advocate for child-led learning. This is where the children control the narrative of their learning and the direction in which it goes in. It is very much about the child being in control of learning in a well-planned and prepared environment, where the role of the adult (or teacher) is to facilitate their learning’ whilst allowing them to lead, problem-solve and think of ideas for themselves. When children have more autonomy over their play and learning (remember play is learning!!) and are given the opportunity to follow their intrinsic motivations and interests we see higher levels of learning from our children, increased concentration and we will also see lots of STEM skills coming through naturally in their play.
A word of caution when being child-led in practise. Remember that the children may have different ideas to us, and that is completely okay. So we may observe something and think, I know we can plan to do x-y-z, but then it comes to doing it and the children are not interested but have rather gone in different direction. They may still do your planned idea, or they may show no interest and that is fine! Stand back observe and ask the children what they would like to do next and tune back into following their agenda of learning; this doesn’t mean our adult-led plans and ideas are bad. And I personally think there is time and space for both, but don’t beat yourself up when you realise there wonderful brains have gone in a different direction to your fabulous brain. They have just made different connections and it’s kind off incredible really!!
HighScope Appraoch - Plan, Do and Review
The process of plan - do and review that is adopted and implemented successfully by the High Scope Approach can be very beneficial to scientific learning and development and may be an approach that you want to consider introducing as part of your BSW23 exploration of the topic connections and beyond.
Plan - this is the children’s opportunity to talk about and share what they would like to do today and how they are going to do this.
Do - is the child’s exploration and play as they go off and do whatever action they have planned.
Review - is the opportunity to discuss, what they have learnt, how well they activity went, what could they do next and so on.
If you would like to find out more about the High Scope Approach please follow the link here for an informative video.
Sometimes within the UK we might use what we refer to as a K-W-L chart to support this process of plan-do-review. This is where for topics or new areas of interest we start with what we know, what we want to learn (where we articulate our questions and things that we want to do) and then we review what we have learned.
For example, if our topic is apples, we might know apple seeds grow into apple trees but we might want to know how? And then after some activities, exploration planned activities, hopefully we will be able to show what we have learned about the life cycle of an apple.
Thank you so much for reading our second blog for BSW23. We hope you are enjoying and finding them interesting, please do like, share with colleagues and comment. Follow us for our next blog post in our BSW23 series that will look at scientific learning and cooking.