Article Review

This article begins with a recommendation that realizing children's hobby of collecting various things or information and encouraging them to work with a collection in a scientific way plays... See More

This article begins with a recommendation that realizing children's hobby of collecting various things or information and encouraging them to work with a collection in a scientific way plays a positive role in their learning. Based on this, providing more opportunities to display a collection as well as describe where they are collected, or post the names of the different life stages of a beetle (larva, pupa, adult beetle) for these elementary students with great variation in developing literacy is emphasized. By giving the specific procedures about how students can complete a collection, where communicating and sharing results with others is an indispensable part, the article states that students' delight and pleasure in collecting will always be beneficial for them to better comprehend the scientific text. In terms of applications, what inspires me most is that this article highlights the significance and necessity of always incorporating reading and writing into science activities. According to this, as a future educator, I will offer my elementary children some digital graphs or toy manipulatives when teaching a certain theme, letting them write down what they have known about this as well as discuss with other classmates so as to improve literacy skills. At the same time, I may not ignore the communication while students are asked to do their own collections. I believe that encouraging them to explain their personal thought, classification standard, and so on, as well as sharing these with others in class will make them better learn and understand relevant science knowledge and content. Besides, it’s a good way to learn from or help each other, which can also engage and motivate them to a large extent.

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Exploring the qualities of a collection is an engaging experience for children, which can build their prior learning while introduce or practice such skills as asking questions, comparing, s... See More

Exploring the qualities of a collection is an engaging experience for children, which can build their prior learning while introduce or practice such skills as asking questions, comparing, sorting, counting, describing, developing the understanding of the objects, and communicating about the investigations, all part of doing scientific inquiry. Working with a collection in a scientific way encourages children to evaluate the items in the collection and use higher-order thinking skills while learning knowledge, which is a good way to teach scientific content without overwhelming young children's attention spans. In the future, in my class, I will introduce the idea of a collection with an example from the school's science supplies to my students. I will encourage my students to work with a collection of natural items to support the goals of investigating the collected items and build knowledge about the natural world. As students bring in items, I will have them write down on some kind of an entry form a description including the type, color, size, any special features, and where they collected it. And then, I will have each student sort the items in the collection according to groupings they determine and hold a discussion about the collection and the categories used by individual students. I will also ask the class to agree on a single set of categories. What's more, I will display the students' collection in a school hallway or library by labeling the collection, the groupings, and the individual items and including a "guest book" for viewers to record their comments.