Curriculum Overview
Science Curriculum for preschoolers
ScienceStart! is the only curriculum for preschoolers that purposefully teaches children about the natural world, providing them with a rich knowledge base and developmentally appropriate use of science process skills.
The ScienceStart! Preschool Curriculum addresses all domains of science, presented at a level appropriate for young children’s interest in exploring and learning about their everyday world. The curriculum is coherent, so that each day’s lesson builds on and reinforces the previous lesson and provides the foundation for the next lesson. The curriculum is integrated, in that science content is explicitly related to activities in math, in language development, in literacy development and during art activities, outdoor play and center-based play.
ScienceStart! is offered thru two program series
Depending on your situation and needs the following options are available:
ScienceStart! Comprehensive PreK Curriculum
A Comprehensive, All-Day/Every-Day curriculum for preschoolers, containing 220 Detailed Lesson Plans that use science investigations to support learning of language, literacy, mathematics, play, and art.
AnyTimeScience!
Fifty detailed lesson plans that add engaging science investigations to your current curriculum. Children follow a simple science cycle as they learn developmentally appropriate biology, chemistry, and physics. Investigations are in alignment with the K-3 standards presented in AAAS’s Benchmarks for Science Literacy and in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
Head Start Curriculum
Unique: ScienceStart! is very different from other commercially available preschool curricula such as High Scope and Creative Curriculum. It is:
- The only preschool curriculum with a primary goal of teaching content/real information. Designed to help children build a rich knowledge base, its “scope and sequence” is organized so that every lesson builds on the previous lesson and provides the foundation for the next lesson.
- The only preschool curriculum purposefully designed to “require” children to develop language skills in order to participate.
- The only curriculum based on both Piagetian and Vygotskian theories of development.
- The only curriculum whose effectiveness has been repeatedly evaluated using pre- and post-test assessments.
- The only curriculum that provides detailed daily lesson plans. These allow teachers to focus directly on student learning rather than spending time trying to develop lesson plans to meet vague guidelines and standards.
Engaging: All teachers know that children learn more when they are engaged and having fun. ScienceStart! activities are purposefully designed to align with children’s desire to learn about the world around them and their preference for active learning. Daily science investigations incorporate language and literacy learning, mathematics, free play and the arts. The pedagogy behind the program has been tested and approved at the University of Rochester, and the entire scheme of learning has been organized for maximum effectiveness.
Developmentally Appropriate Yet Challenging: Recent research shows that children learn language, literacy, and other intellectual skills most effectively when they are engaged in meaningful activities that require these skills. That is, when children want to accomplish something, they are – with sufficient adult support – usually able to develop the skills needed to meet their goals.
Timely: Over the past decade, educational policy makers have emphasized the need for American students to increase proficiency in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and to begin doing so at the earliest grade levels. However, until recently, science education did not begin until after children had learned to read, typically in third grade or even later. We now know that young children are fascinated by science and are able to learn both science process skills and science content prior to learning to read. In fact, learning science helps develop literacy skills.
Effective: ScienceStart! materials have been used by hundreds of teachers and thousands of students across the United States and abroad. Four research studies conducted at University of Rochester have shown that participation in ScienceStart! classrooms directly impacts children’s knowledge about the everyday world, the cognitive skills associated with reasoning according to a simple science cycle, vocabulary, and other language and literacy skills.