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Hello all, I am getting ready to teach my first science lesson to a kindergarten class. Being a first semester student teacher, I have been advised to work on my engagement with my students. What are some ways you engage your students when teaching a science lesson? I plan to use a book as my engagement but would like to hear other ideas as well.

Nicolette, I think using a book as a read aloud is a great way to have 1st graders engaged from the get-go, as you are doing, provided you are animated when you read it! Read with expression and be alive! If you are not feeling the book, using a video related to the content (one that does not explicitly teach the content you are going to teach) to have students engaged. It does not take much to get KG graders engaged/excited or any child for that matter. Heck, I'm a college student, and I still enjoy a good read aloud. Everyone loves a good story/book. Anyways, I taught a science lesson about two weeks ago on the order of the planets in the solar system to a class of 3rd graders and I had them walk around in class with their eyes closed, envisioning they were in space. I had them think about what they would see, encounter, do, and much more. I never told them what I was teaching or what the point was, but I had them think about and see what what they already knew about space. Everyone really enjoyed it, and they all shared what they "saw" to the class. Read alouds, videos, games, and having students move or do something is the way to go, in my opinion. Good luck with your lesson!

Dear Nicolette, Below is a NSTA Collection about the 5Es - hope the resoirces within are useful to you and others - add them to your library. http://learningcenter.nsta.org/mylibrary/collection.aspx?id=Y33r73BlC74_E Take care, Flavio.

Definitely try and incorporate hands on activities when you want to engage young students. Let them explore and be able to manipulate their environment. It will get them interested and help lead them into deeper levels of inquiry later on.

I am a student right now going into Early Childhood Education and will student teaching soon. I know this is something I will struggle with at the beginning of my student teaching, so I am very tuned into this forum. I think my problem is that I know what I should do and what would be best for the children, but I have a hard to actually getting myself to apply it. 

Using a lot of hands-on activities is always a good idea with young children, but sometimes I worry when I try to do hands-on activities that I lose track of what the lesson is supposed to be and what is supposed to be being taught because the activities are fun and entertaining. What type of preparation or advice do you have for this?

I found an awesome article by Scholastic called hands-on is minds-on that was very helpful. Here it is!  http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3751901

I do highly recommend the 5E lesson plan that the others suggested. Also, make sure you look at your science standards for that grade and create some learning targets/learning objectives that you want to acheive when doing the activity. I may also use a guiding questions which hopefully will be answered. Do you use science journals? I taught kindergarten and we used science journals a lot. They were not to young to use them and created lots of pictures of the science experiments that we did. They loved it! Hands on does not mean chaos if you have a good planned out idea of what you want to do.