Today I'm going to be explaining how we introduce the concept of the scientific method to young children.
And the scientific method is just a universal method of exploration that uses five basic steps.
Which are forming a goal or a research question;
creating a hypothesis; doing an experiment;
measuring the results of the experiment; and explaining those results.
So young children already have a natural desire to explore and investigate their environment.
And we can tell this by their usage of how and why questions.
This little activity is just a quick and easy activity that I like to do with my children
to start introducing some of those scientific investigation skills.
What you will need for this activity is just a glass or some kind of container that can hold a few inches of water;
some food coloring, and celery.
So I'm going to walk you through how this experiment addresses each of the five steps of the scientific method.
So the first step, to form a goal or research question.
I do this by asking the children what they already know about celery, and what they would like to find out.
So my children said they would like to find out how celery gets water,
and if the celery would change color when put into colored water.
So we've then formed our hypothesis, which is a prediction of what will happen when I put the celery into the colored water.
So out of 12 children, seven of them predicted that the celery would change color,
and the other five thought that it would not.
The next step is actually doing the experiment. So to begin, you'll just put a couple inches of water in a container
and add a few drops of food coloring. And while you're doing this you, want to be actively engaging your students
and asking them questions to help them think deeper and stay engaged with the experiment.
So I'm just going to add a few drops and um,
when I did this with my class, I had a child say that the food coloring looked heavy in the water.
So this led me to the concept of density. And I was able to explain that to the children.
And explain that the food coloring is heavier than the water,
which makes it sink down to the bottom.
Next we will put the celery into the colored water.
And then you're just going to put this somewhere in your classroom that the children can go and observe it over the next few days,
and see the changes that are taking place.
Moving on to the results. Here you can see I have a piece of celery that's been sitting in here actually for a couple of weeks now.
And you can see that it's very dark dark green just like the water down here.
So the celery does indeed change color, and the stalks and the leaves do as well, to match the color in the container.
And I explain, help explain this to my children by cutting open a celery.
And we were able to see that the red food coloring actually ran all the way through the tubes of the celery.
And that led me to the explanation of how the celery gets its water, which was our original research question.
So we can see that the celery gets its water by sucking it up into tubes, as demonstrated by this picture of the food coloring.
This is a really quick and simple experiment, and there's many others that you can do as well.
You might even have the children draw before and after pictures to help them conceptualize the changes in the process.
So here I just had my students draw a picture before and after the celery has been sitting in the water.
And you can see the changes here.
Just a quick experiment you can do, and there's many others you can also do with this method.
So this is great to practice observation, exploration, and research skills for young children.