Integrating Children’s Literature With Science and Math

Introduction: 

Integrating children’s literature with math and science during their early childhood settings is essential. It provides children with an engaging and effective way to enhance interdisciplinary learning and literacy skills related to scientific and mathematical concepts. Incorporation of science and math study in an ECE setting is crucial in building children’s critical thinking capacity, cognitive development, and effective problem-solving skills in the future.

Book Selection:

For this assignment, the book selection process is specific to children between the age of 3-5 years. The selected science book is “Teaching STEM in the Early Years” by Sally Moomaw while the math book is “A Picture Book Pedagogy for Early Childhood Mathematics Education” Written by Laura Dunphy.

Book Activities:

Math Book Activities

A Picture Book Pedagogy for Early Childhood Mathematics Education provides various learning activities. Pattern art activity: Read a storybook that incorporates patterns such as “Pattern Fish” by Trudy Harris. The patterns include simple patterns such as ABAB, AABB, BBCA, ACCA, or NAME. Later, early childhood educators can provide children with writing such as markers, crayons, stickers, and colored papers to create their patterned artwork (Dunphy, 2020). This fosters creativity potential and builds confidence among children.

In addition, choosing a storybook with a counting theme is essential for early childhood mathematics. For example, Chicka 123 by Michael Sampson and Bill Martin will be impactful in the ECE setting. Children have the opportunity to read as they count characters, objects, and actions in the storybook. Then teachers can provide counting manipulatives such as blocks, books, or counters, for the children to demonstrate what they learned in the book. This activity promotes the children’s counting, number recognition, and number representation structure ability.

Another activity in the Math book is reading a picture book. The picture book must encompass different shapes and drawings. Afterward, take the children for a random walk around the school to identify objects with different shapes within their school environment. The shapes may include squares, triangles, rectangles, and circles. These concepts of shapes, surrounding environment awareness, and shapes will promote the children’s analytic thinking capacity.

Science Book Activities

The selected science book, “Teaching STEM in the Early Years provides various learning activities for ECE setting.

A classroom activity that examines the plant’s life cycles will be crucial such as a garden journal. A classroom garden, pictures, and books will help to explore and draw insights about plant life. The plant life cycle will introduce topics such as seed germination, growth pattern, flowering, and fruiting. This activity will involve children in plant growth and close monitoring of plant growth stages. The children will be provided with a journal to document the growth of their plant for classwork. For example, use of rulers and measuring tapes to measure and record plant heights and leave length. This will foster children’s measuring skills and encourage scientific observation over time.

In addition, sinking and floating experiments will have a profound impact on children. Prior to the classroom activity, the educator will explain different factors that determine the sinking and floating of an object. Children will be required to collect objects with different shapes, densities, materials, and volume. Afterward, children will make predictions on the objects that will sink or float based on size, shape, and material. To test the children’s theoretical knowledge, provide a basin of water and guide them on how to test the collected objects while they record their observations and assess the accuracy of their predictions (Moomaw, 2024). This will prompt the children to seek scientific explanations of the object’s sinking or floating behavior. Overall, questions such as, “What do you notice about the objects that sank? What explanation do you have for objects that floated?” will enhance the children’s analytical and critical thinking skills.

Another activity is an exploration of colors with nature. A nature walk will help students to identify different colors and collect items they find admirable. During the nature walk, advise children to use descriptive words to discuss the colors they observe. In addition, guiding color discussions will smoothen children’s color exploration activity. After the nature walks providing sorting bins for children to sort the collected objects on a color basis will be significant. The sorting activity will enhance children’s observation skills and help introduce the concept of scientific classification. Counting and recording the sorted items reinforces children’s basic counting skills and numerical concepts.

Learning Environments:

The creation of a supportive learning environment for children between 3 to 5 years will play an integral role in enhancing literacy skills related to math and science.

Math Learning Environment

1. Setting up an art zone in the school with different learning materials for creating patterns and drawings will significantly impact the children’s creativity and confidence. These materials include stickers, markers, paint, and colored paper.
2. The activity of counting with storybooks is impactful. The learning environment will provide a comfortable reading posture by using comfortable seats and a well-arranged bookshelf with counting-theme storybooks. This enhances the child’s numerical concepts and counting skills.
3. For picture reading activity, well-arranged shapes according to their color and shape in the classroom with their labels are important. This environment will favor children’s observation skills. In addition, providing clipboards for children to draw and copy the shapes in the class will foster children’s recording and creative potential.

Science Learning Environment

1. The sinking and floating experiment requires a water station to explore this concept. The learning environment will provide children with water basins, prediction sheets, 10 objects per student, and data collection sheets. This will promote the child’s observation and data-recording skills.
2. The garden journal will require the selection of a classroom corner to serve as a garden. Every child will be provided with planting pots, soils, planting seeds, watering jerricans, and a journal to record and measure their plant progress.
3. For the exploration of nature based on colors, early childhood educators will create a classroom exploration center. The exploration center will be stocked with baskets for collecting tins, magnifying lenses, and large soring tins to classify the items according to their colors.

Overall, by implementing these math and science learning activities and creating a supporting learning environment, kindergarten, and preschool children will have the opportunity to deeply examine science and math concepts.

Plan Outline

This plan provides a well-detailed approach to incorporating children’s literature with math and science. It entails the developmental needs and preferences of children within the bracket of kindergarten and preschool. The learning activities offer a deeper understanding of science technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) topics through hands-on exploration, creative platforms, problem-solving, and critical thinking.

The learning environment for children between 3 to 5 years is structured in a way that supports and addresses different learning preferences. Ensuring the children actively engage in exploration, discovery, discussions, and peer-playing activities promotes interdisciplinary learning and literacy skills related to scientific and mathematical concepts.

References

Dunphy, L. (2020). A picture book pedagogy for early childhood mathematics education. STEM Education Across the Learning Continuum: Early Childhood to Senior Secondary, 67-85.

Moomaw, S. (2024). Teaching STEM in the early years: Activities for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Redleaf Press.