Home / Educators / Professional Development (3 - 5 YEARS) / Leading Children in Hands-On Exploration
- Introduction
- Prepare Ahead
- Guide Children’s Explorations
- Help Children Make Connections
- Try It
- Wrap Up
- Standards
- concept: an idea or understanding about something
- data: what has been observed or experienced
- evidence: data that support an explanation or conclusion
- model: to explicitly demonstrate a process, behavior, or task
- open-ended questions: questions that require critical thinking, invite opinion or explanation, and result in more than a one-word answer
- phenomenon(a): an object, material, living thing or event that can be directly observed
- represent: to make a drawing or model of something that has been observed
- scaffold: a temporary support that helps children learn; it may include prompts, hints, reminders, or models
- science talk: words that are commonly used by scientists such as compare, predict, measure, sort
Wrap Up
Now you're ready to implement the best practices you’ve learned with the children in your program. Complete the second half of the Self-Assessment to discover how much your skills may have improved.
Congratulations! Whether your progress was subtle or dramatic, you've undoubtedly increased your understanding and strengthened your skills. But this is just the beginning—there are many ways to improve and support your children’s learning experience. Look for more informative self-paced tutorials in the Professional Development section of this website.
For a summary of best practices, download the Best Practices (PDF). To see the standards this module correlates to, download the Standards (PDF).