Let’s declare 2024 as a year of curiosity! Young children are naturally curious about the world, so you have tons of chances to work in some learning as you play and discover together. Adding STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) into your day is a great way to follow your child’s curiosity.
What does STEM for the youngest kiddos look like? For the littlest kids, singing songs that have repetitive patterns like Old Mac Donald Had a Farm, seeing what sinks and floats during bath time, building with blocks, counting how many slices of bananas they get for snack, and exploring faces in the mirror. As your child grows, you can explore activities based on books. For example, we love the idea of using The Three Little Pigs as a starting point for building houses out of different materials and testing their sturdiness with a hairdryer!
This month we challenge you to embrace winter STEM with your child. This is a great chance to get curious about how ice forms and melts, how and why bears hibernate, how Polar Bear Blubber insulates, and why the amount of daylight changes during the year.
This topic is a key component of the following early learning domain and goal from the State of Alaska Early Learning Guidelines:
Approaches to Learning
- Children show curiosity and interest in learning
- Children persist when facing challenges
- Children learn through play and exploration
General Knowledge and Cognition
- Children find multiple solutions to questions, tasks, problems, and challenges
- Children demonstrate knowledge of numbers and counting
- Children demonstrate some knowledge of measurement: size, volume, height, etc.
- Children sort, classify, and organize objects
- Children collect information through observation and manipulation
- Children make predictions and experiment
- Children observe and describe the natural world
