Creating an Outdoor Loose Parts Classroom: One Preschool’s Quest for Boundless STEM (original) (raw)
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Australian educational researcher, 2024
Despite the many benefits of play, within primary school, play is often reduced to lunch breaks, particularly as children move to higher grades. Loose parts play affords children opportunities to develop imagination and 21st-century skills (collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking). As part of a larger project, two Year 4 classes in an Australian primary school (two teachers and 46 children, aged 9-10 years) engaged in one hour of structured or unstructured loose parts play during class time for eight weeks using a Nüdel Kart (loose parts play cart). Children in the structured play group were set challenges and taught creative attitudes and processes. Data was collected through children's surveys and focus groups and teacher interviews. Children and teachers were overwhelmingly positive about the play sessions. Children enjoyed the opportunities for construction, social skills and creativity, while teachers focused on inclusion and social skills. Future classroom practice recommendations include integrating both play types and meeting creativity and social and emotional curriculum requirements through loose parts play.
Journal of Childhood, Education & Society
This manuscript reports the results of a research study exploring the ways in which physical space and teacher pedagogy are related to preschoolers’ engagement with science and engineering practices while at play. Using the Science and Engineering Practices Observation Protocol (SciEPOP), researchers captured children’s engagement with the eight science and engineering practices identified in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This study explores relationships between specific playspaces, materials, and pedagogical strategies, and children’s patterns of engagement with particular science and engineering practices during free play. There are notable differences in the spaces, materials, and pedagogies children encounter across the four participating preschools, and these differences suggest significant gaps in children’s opportunities to engage in and deepen their enactment of science and engineering practices. The authors present evidence in support of adaptive, personali...
Knowledge in Use: Designing for Play in Kindergarten Science Contexts
Journal for Leadership, Equity, and Research, 2021
Decades of research support integrating play in kindergarten to benefit young students' social, emotional, and cognitive development. As academic readiness becomes a focus, time for play has decreased. As a result, there has been a demand for integration of play with content. This study modifies a project-based science curriculum about how living things grow to include both childinitiated play and teacher-guided play to meet disciplinary learning goals. The curriculum was initially designed to address reform science standards based on knowledge-in-use. We explore how play invites all students to access and understand the phenomenon. The qualitative study involves 18 kindergarteners and their teacher in a Great Lakes state in the U.S. highlighting four lessons during the enactment that emphasized play. Data include observation, audio recording, transcription of interviews, children involved in play, classroom dialogue, and the examination of artifacts. Thematic coding and analysis of field notes, interviews, and dialogue suggest that childinitiated imaginary play and teacher-guided play can promote the science practice, science ideas, and crosscutting concept of patterns needed to explain the phenomenon.
2019
Playing enhances learning. Teachers who recognize and foster the science and engineering practices of playful endeavors push the envelope of children’s thinking. Play is purposeful learning, and it serves an important role in human development. Researchers define play as exploratory, process oriented, intrinsically motivating, and freely chosen (Lozon, 2016). The notion of tinkering, often associated with play, has underpinned forward-thinking children’s museums and science centers for decades. This creative expression enhances deep learning when supported by intentional guidance (Bevan, Petrich, & Wilkinson, 2015). For the purposes of the current discussion, the authors found that the crosscutting concepts of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2013) provide a powerful lens and language through which to provide the type of guidance that challenges students’ thinking and enhances the natural science and engineering practices of children’s play.
Conversation: Loose Parts-A Pathway from Play to Technology
Computational thinking was defined as a way humans solve problems. It is not trying to get humans to think like computers. There has been a lack of interest for computational thinking in higher education. This presentation is calling for an innovative approach that starts with the identification of a discipline specific problem space within a higher education student's program of study. Keywords-loose parts; imaginative behavior; instructional design; computational thinking.
Messin' Around: The Role of Play In Middle Level Science Education
The authors propose a novel conceptual framework for a middle school physical science curriculum: play. They describe how play allows the integration of the I Wonder model, the K-12 Framework for Science education, the cross cutting concepts and the nature of science. They draw upon their own teaching experiences and theoretical constructs in the literature to outline a practical physical science curriculum at the middle level: Physical Prestidigitations and Chemical Conjurings. The authors also pay tribute to their mentor Fred Wilkin, Jr.
Science in action in spontaneous preschool play – an essential foundation for future understanding
Early Child Development and Care
Children, like the young of many species, are born to play; it is the means by which young mammals acquire essential life skills From where do these practitioners of Science Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) acquire their understanding of their everyday world? Playing is an essential apprenticeship for developing (STEM) literacy. In the empirical tradition, observing children at their spontaneous play reveals that they are experiencing STEM in action, learning through thinking and doing, experience what happens if? Observing phenomena, asking questions, solving problems, designing investigations and ingeniously adapting what is available to use in these active Prespeaking children, until they acquire verbal language for themselves, communicate by gestures and actions, observing and storing the experiences oyd. We maintain, from our observational work, that children have various modes of play. Observations and Investigative play when they explore, plan, and do as well as evaluating the outcome and imaginative play where they replicate activities of adults that they have witnessed, such as dressing up as an adult, cooking in a make-believe kitchen, or, for example, composing and acting out a narrative in a mud kitchen. In all these activities children often compose their own narrative. Humans have always been storytellers and telling young children stories is a key activity in their development and as a growing membership of their community. Communities tell stories to children; taduts read stoties to children. Hence children also learn about the world through listening and watching physical representations of these stories in often brightly coloured illustrations. In these representations of their everyday world children see representations on and in the media, which may be authentic representations or imaginary such as in cartoons, toys and pictorial fiction books. However, many enjoyable stories contain science information inadvertently and not written to accurately inform. Hence some understandings of the natural world are obtained which are incorrect, in fact mythical and there develops a conflict in the mind of the emergent scientist between myth and reality. This cognitive conflict begins to be resolved at about six years when children start being able to recognise myth as such, but the misinformation may linger.
International Journal of STEM Education
Background Computational approaches in STEM foster creative extrapolations of ideas that extend the bounds of human perception, processing, and sense-making. Inviting teachers to explore computational approaches in STEM presents opportunities to examine shifting relationships to inquiry that support transdisciplinary learning in their classrooms. Similarly, play has long been acknowledged as activity that supports learners in taking risks, exploring the boundaries and configurations of existing structures, and imagining new possibilities. Yet, play is often overlooked as a crucial element of STEM learning, particularly for adolescents and adults. In this paper, we explore computational play as an activity that supports teachers’ transdisciplinary STEM learning. We build from an expansive notion of computational activity that involves jointly co-constructing and co-exploring rule-based systems in conversation with materials, collaborators, and communities to work towards jointly defi...
RABSEL
This paper aims to focus on the international studies regarding early integrated STEM education and its importance for developing 21st-century skills in young children to prepare them for an ever-changing world. The paper reviews the importance of integrated STEM education in early childhood settings and how it supports the development of scientific concepts and 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and problem solving through play-based learning based on the current literature. Adding to the importance of STEM education, the paper explores what STEM education means in early childhood and how different types of play-based learning can support early integrated STEM concepts and skills in young children concerning the literature from different parts of the world. Furthermore, the literature presents the role of teachers in implementing STEM practices and the challenges encountered by teachers. The literature indicates low self-efficacy and confidence in teachers as the main fa...
STEM Practice in the Early Years
Creative Education
In 2015 and 2017, we observed four preschool centres, researching science, maths and technology pedagogy and how opportunities presented themselves for learning in outdoor settings. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate STEM practises in the early years, practices that are informed by play-based education pedagogies, to understand approaches to STEM education. The research adopted a mixed methods approach which, in addition to our observations, included a pilot survey and educator interviews. These data are brought together to examine practices of STEM education in pre-schools. We were able to view preschool centres as places that provide varied, rich experiences for children to develop understandings of STEM. Importantly, we observed that children's STEM experiences enhance their self-belief in their ability to learn STEM, and these early years' opportunities trigger STEM appreciation and its value to everyday life. We were able to conclude from the research results that integrated STEM, particularly science and mathematics, arise through children's play and themes arising from their interests. The findings importantly highlight how different practices and pedagogies are used to support STEM learning.