The Monarch Project:  Have you ever seen the emergence of a Monarch butterfly from it’s chrysalis? The wet, crumpled wings leave you wondering if it will ever be able to fly.  It is  a profoundly moving experience to hear the excited exclamations of the children discovering that the butterfly is emerging.  Every year our August-September service work focuses on rearing dozens of Monarch’s from egg to butterfly and releasing them into the wild.  Monarch art and research is passionately and spontaneously pursued by all ages.  Andrew has been doing this with his parents since he was a young child.  Wonderful family tradition!  

Science isn’t just knowledge, it’s a way of thinking about the world. It is our attempt to make sense of things that we see and to learn about how the world works.  Young children are natural scientists, and their innate curiosity is the key to the forming of questions and theories about how things work.

Why does the turtle close up his shell? Why do the leaves fall off?  How does the apple peeler work?

Science happens everywhere in an early childhood program.  For the purpose of our learning experiences, we have pulled out engineering and physics related science to it’s own experience category and focus our interests here largely around the Life Sciences, but other domains certainly appear as interests grow.

It’s not about facts or knowledge, but about stimulating and nurturing curiosity, questioning and life learning.  We help children to make graphic placeholders for their questions and theories through photographs or videos for revisiting, mindmaps and journaling.  This enables the children to revisit their interests and build on previous knowledge and “aha” moments.  We actively observe the world around us, both in and out of the classroom, form questions, and investigate answers to questions by creating experiments.

Scientific thinking is naturally stimulated by the abundance of living things and interesting materials.

As you look through our projects, keep in mind that most of them resulted from an emergent and passionate interest and curiosity of the children to go deeper.  Passionate science, that’s what I’m talking about!

It’s all about curiosity!