Starting Early

   To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour

--William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

We start Science in the early childhood years to channel and build on children’s natural predilection for discovery and their indescribable joy in finding out about how the world works. Today an earthworm; tomorrow, perhaps, a cosmic wormhole.

Young children are natural explorers and natural investigators.  When children are introduced to science early on as an extension of their wondering and question, it becomes fun and natural.  When science is introduced as experiences and experiments, it stays fun and natural.  Kim Saxe, one of the founders of the Design Thinking movement, has recently tweeted about the experience of awe and the role awe in motivating and renewing our students and ourselves.  This is the way science should be, especially in the early years.  The impulse to want to know what something is, how it works, and why it works is at the heart of science.  Of course, as you learn more and dig deeper into how the natural world works, it takes more skill and more effort to find increasingly more subtle answers to our more complex questions.  And, we need more complex tools and techniques to find these answers.  And it takes more work, more effort, and more grit to learn to use these tools that are necessary ferret out the answers we seek.  But, if we push the tools and techniques ahead of the awe, we kill the natural curiosity of our students.

Jason Silva gets at this same idea in his amazing video Awe.

See this YouTube video!