Science teachers have an exciting opportunity to teach children about how the world works through exploration and hands-on activities rather than just facts. As a preschool teacher, lesson planning is important to engage different types of learners through varied activities suited to their levels and intelligences. Bringing real plants and examples into the classroom or doing outdoor activities can help children easily grasp lessons and stay engaged by discovering ideas on their own. Techniques like using realia, music, role play and peer learning help teach science in a meaningful way, while unavailable or expensive materials present more challenges.
1. HOW DO WE TEACH SCIENCE?
Science teachers have an exciting opportunity to teach the children about
how the science makes the world works. Being a teacher is also a learning
experience. In here, our aim in teaching science is not to cram our children’s head
with scientific facts and information they have little use for. Instead we explore
the natural world, build connections through explorations and hands-on activities.
For me as a preschool teacher, lesson planning is very important because
with this we can formulate different types of activities to reach all learners and
we can strategize our instructions that are suited to their levels and multiple
intelligences. We could not deny the fact that some of our students will be
auditory learners, some will be visual learners and still others will be kinesthetic
learners. The learners could be right brainers or left brainers thus, we will need to
do activities and lessons to reach all types of learners. It is always best as many
real world examples in our lessons as possible. For example, if you were teaching
parts of a plant in a kindergarten, you could actually have a real plant in front of
you that you could refer to, to show to the class each part of a plant with its
function. By that children can easily grasp the lesson being taught.
2. In my class, during this subject some of my children are easily get bored so
what I usually did was I brought them outside the four corners of the classroom.
We had a tour and I am their tourist guide just inside the school campus this is
what we called outdoor activities but this is only allowed if the lessons call for
outdoor activities such as kinds of plants, flowering and non-flowering plants, types
of leaves and kinds of soil. I found this activity really effective to the above
mentioned topics and for the learners to be motivated to learn something around
them because out of this, children can discover new ideas on their own that would
somehow result to asking questions. And I considered this as the easiest way of
teaching Science because the more the children involved themselves to the real
world the more meaningful learning they accumulated. So, bringing realia or real
object inside the classroom in presenting is advisable as long as it is feasible and
available. Other practices are music integration, role play and peer- learning. The
difficult way to teach Science if the materials reflected in our lesson guide to be
utilized are not available in our school even in the locality and are expensive to buy.
These techniques help engage learners and help them understand the
importance of science.