Chapter 9: Environment Science

Children have a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world. Children are highly engaged when they have the opportunity to explore. They create strong and enduring mental representations of what they have experienced in investigating the everyday world. They acquire the vocabulary to describe and share these mental representations and the concepts that evolve from them. Children then rely on the mental representations as the basis for further learning. A child's focus is on finding out how things work. Science in the classroom is not a complicated process; it is an activity that occurs normally in the classroom as students explore blocks, art, dramatic play, or search the outdoors.