Life Science in Early Childhood

Life Science In Early Childhood
In my previous posts I had presented information on why science is important in the early childhood classroom and a general framework of easy ways to implement it. This post will focus specifically on life science for early learners. While researching I came across the book, Worms, Shadows and Whirlpools, by Karen Worth and Sharon Grollman. The book had sections on life science, physical science and earth and space science. Each section presents ideas of content to teach early learners. This post will focus on the life science section.
The book says that life science is about urging children to think about living things: what they look like, how they live, and how they change. Another purpose of life science is to teach children how to treat living things and their habitats with respect. Looking at life science in this way provides us with many opportunities to bring science into the early childhood classroom. Below is a list of content the book suggests:

Physical Characteristics of Living Things
• Color
• Shape
• Texture
• Parts
Encourage children to talk, draw, and write (if possible) about how the physical characteristics influence what the animal eats, where the animal lives and how it survives. Looking at physical characteristics is also a great time to start comparison/contrast conversations or drawings.

Basic Needs of Living Things
• Food
• Water
• Air
• Safe place to live
Discuss the variety of ways that organisms meet their needs, talk about similarities and differences of how needs are met.
• Plants vs. Animals
This content is also a good time to start children thinking about needs vs. wants

Life Cycles
Change over time can happen fast or slow. Many of these changes are related to the stages of the life cycle. Provide children with the opportunity to observe some of these changes. This can help them to being to understand the concepts of past, present and future. Life cycles should also help children to being to see that even though the events in a specific life cycle may be different, most things have a “universal” life cycle.

There are many other topics outlined in the book. As you can see by the topics listed above it is very easy to incorporate life science into everyday classroom activities.