scientific process

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Home : 2003 : September : 18

scientific process
By Julianne

Children love to guess how something will turn out. That's the beginning to teaching them the scientific process. Think of an experiment that you can do with your students that will have predictable results. It should
be something the majority of them haven't done before. Look for ideas in children's science books. (I like Janice VanCleave.) You'll want students to make a hypothesis, develop an experiment to test it, do the experiment, record the results and compare their results to their hypothesis. Here's how I attack the process:
1. Introduce the subject through art, a read-aloud or a video. Talk

about what the children saw and heard. You might want to write their observations down. We study plants and begin by reading the story, "A seed is a promise", then go on to discuss how plants grow.
2. Ask, "I wonder what would happen if..." to introduce your experiment. Ours is "I wonder what would happen if we didn't give the seed everything it needed to grow." Take guesses. These are their hypotheses. Write them down. You might even want the students to draw a picture of what they think will happen.
3. Help the students to design an experiment to test their guess. Since you already know what the experiment should look like, you can gently guide them that direction. If they want something different, you can accommodate that too.
4. Set up and run the experiment. Have students keep track of the process and the results. For our seed growing we draw pictures and write what we saw in a journal.
5. When the experiment is over, go back to the students' original guess and ask them if they were right. What surprised them? What would they like to do with the information? Sometimes they really want to try something else to see if they get different results.