Teaching Children to Discover New Things

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Pam Grier on behalf of Expert Village and I am going to teach you how to bring home fundamentals learned at school. The science center is a great way for a three year old to be learning just the way it is for someone in a first grade class or a second grade class. Just because they in a daycare center all day doesn't mean they aren't learning anything. They are learning about making predictions and changing when you?re looking at the weather. A great fun thing to do is talk about density. Most kids don't know why things float or why things sink. This is fun you just take a regular water bottle you fill it with anything you want and you fill it up with water and glitter and they are going to notice that all the glitter is staying at the bottom and you can talk about water and density and all that stuff. But then when you shake it up the kids can see that everything mixes together. Kids are going to love playing with this and if you have younger kids you may want to tape the top or the bottom or super glue it. Older kids usually understand it needs to stay shut. They learn about classifying and measuring and counting and graphing like say separating bugs. The bugs that fly, the bugs that hop. Also just looking at this right quick some kids may think this is a spider but when you point out that it only has six legs so the kids are going to learn the difference. So the kids can classify bugs by the number of legs they have if they have antennae or not if they have wings or not. They strengthen their gross motor skills by doing shadows, that?s a discovery that many of them have not known before. They develop fine motor skills by using tweezers to pick up bugs. Most classrooms have an actually pet in the classroom this teaches them about rules for using the material, taking care of living things, learning what to do if the bowl gets dirty. So they learn a lot of responsibilities in science center."