Chapter 2 Reflections

I thought it was pretty interesting that this chapter pretty much started out by saying that we use the thinking skills that we use in everyday life. I guess I never thought of it like that before. Younger children tend to observe globally and tend to miss potentially relevant details. They often see what they expect to see, and they may focus more on difference than similarities. (pg 31) I am so used to watching older people observe that I would have never thought that younger children do not observe the way we do. Half of this chapter was pretty much review because it describes the processes of science which are observing, classifying, inferring, measuring, communicating, predicting, hypothesizing, and experimenting. Something I found very useful, that I would use in the classroom is the "I notice/I wonder" chart on page 38. I think it is a great way for children to observe then ask questions about the observations that they can further investigate. I never realized that there are three different kinds of investigations, which are descriptive, classificatory, and experimental. This chapter also says that different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of scientific investigations. It also says that effective teachers must be skilled observers of children and effective guides of the inquiry process, meaning that they need to decide when and how to guide, when to encourage more exploration, how to scaffold learning through prompts, hints, questions and other means, when to provide information, and when to connect students to other sources. (pg 57) The last sentence of this chapter pretty much sums up everything: teaching and learning science through an inquiry approach is challenging but well worth the effort!