Science & Engineering
At SEE, children learn about the world around them through hands-on, playful exploration. Through the “Big Ideas” that anchor our curriculum and meaningful projects, children are exposed to the key practices for engaging in science, such as asking questions, making predictions, testing their ideas, developing models, and exploring how things work. Children develop important skills like observing carefully, sharing their ideas, and figuring things out with friends and teachers. Pre-K standards ask students to demonstrate an ability to ask questions, set up simple investigations, analyze evidence, observations, and data for patterns, and use evidence to explain or develop ideas about how phenomena work.
Exploring the World in Preschool
Our preschool students learn by experiencing and observing the world around them. Through hands-on exploration, they investigate plants, animals, weather, light, shadows, and movement. Using their senses, they discover how living things use body parts to meet basic needs and begin to understand properties of materials like texture, color, solids, and liquids. As they share their ideas through conversation, children strengthen both their language and early math skills. These experiences build curiosity, wonder, and a growing awareness of the natural world.
Engaging in hand-on play-based inquiry, boosts curiosity and promotes scientific thinking in young learners.
Big Ideas
- Building Projects–Using materials like Legos, Magna-Tiles, and blocks to explore structure, balance, and design.
- Planting and Gardening–Learning about plant life cycles, growth, and caring for living things.
- Transportation–Explore a variety of modes of transportation and how it brings the community together.
- Weather–Children explore how communities are affected by changes in the weather. They compare and contrast how animals and people respond to and prepare for those changes.
- Shadow and Light & Reflection–Children explore the properties and functions of light. They will consider how light is beneficial to people and animals. Children will have multiple opportunities to ask questions, set up simple experiments, and develop ideas about how phenomena work.
- Water All Around Us–In Water All Around Us, children build on and extend understandings they gained in Growing & Changing to explore how all living things depend on and need water and survival.
- Growing & Changing–To explore how all living things depend on and need water for survival. Growing & Changing, children build on and extend understandings they gained in Life in Trees to explore the life cycle of all living things, from insects to plants to people.
- Life In Trees–Children discover the interconnectedness of nature’s systems. They compare and contrast life in trees to their lives in neighborhoods and communities.