Technology in the Education of Science for Young Children

Science is an exciting topic that is difficult to instruct at an early childhood education level. With the incorporation of technology, this subject could potentially become more comprehendible for the young students. Stephanie Robbie and I decided to pose the question: “For our ED331 course, we have been instructed to research a "difficult to teach" topic for early childhood. We have been asked to contact a teacher and ask about any known technology to aid in the instruction of the content area. For our subject we have chosen science. Is there any creative, technological teaching strategies that you know of for early childhood education?” for our professor and former early childhood educator, Julie Jameson. She responded back with a few excellent resources: “There are all kinds of great videos and websites designed for interactive science. These are perfect for young children. Take the theme of space for example. There are all kinds of NASA videos that show space travel, satellite photos of the earth, the moon, and other planets. It's really awesome! You can also teach children to keep basic data using technology. For example, they can enter in the height and weight of each classmate and make graphs based upon the tallest, smallest, etc. This could be done using virtually any two types of data. You could track how many kids prefer hot dogs to hamburgers or boys to girls, etc.” Along with this acquired information, Stephanie and I researched software and web resources that would be helpful in teaching young children the subject of science. The best websites/computer programs that we found included: *cosmos4kids.com *kidsgardening.org *teachingheart.net/teachinginsects *www.sciencemadesimple.com