Ask Mrs. Tiller!
“Why is the sky blue?” “Are snails and slugs the same animal?” "Where did the dinosaurs go?”Sarah Tiller, fields these questions and many others each day as the River School’s science educator. Now in her second year of teaching at the River School, Sarah Tiller has a knack for challenging the innate curiosity of even the youngest naturalists.
“I've said that of all the subjects you could teach a child, science is the closest to magic,” Sarah noted recently. “I haven't yet met a child who isn't interested in science – they have such an immense natural curiosity. Whether it's simple physics, demonstrated by rolling a ball down an inclined plane, or biology – they all love animals so much – they are all so thrilled and fascinated to see science in action."
"They all love dinosaurs and some of them know the dinosaurs' names better than I do, but you use them to show how animals change over time and go extinct. Any new animal sparks their interest, and you use that new animal to illustrate, for instance, scientific classification, or modes of living. I choose topics so that children are immediately interested in one aspect, but then use that topic to broaden their experience into wider scientific knowledge.”
“What's fascinating is that kids today have a huge exposure to scientific information in their daily lives and in the world right around them. They have such an awareness of the environment, and how we're changing it. It's great to be able to pull in experiences and observations from their own lives, and build lessons from those. It really gives an immediacy and relevance to the science lessons I'm teaching.”
Experimentation is a key element in all scientific pursuits, and plays a major roll in all of Mrs. Tiller’s classes. "Early in the year, every child made his or her own small volcano during our study of the early Earth. Each child then added plants, ancient insects, and eventually dinosaurs to their volcanoes, to make a diorama that showed the history of life. Then I let them erupt a volcano – the old baking-soda demonstration – to show how geothermic processes work.”
Because the children were so curious about dinosaurs, Mrs. Tiller expanded the experimentation on the subject by conducting “a dinosaur dig; a mock excavation of some dinosaur bones. What's neat is that with the creative aspects of these activities, we can show how scientists themselves often use their imaginations to visualize past environments. Running through these is learning about the scientific method, which one small child described to me as "you do something, and wait and see what happens."
Sarah further explained, “One thing I'm trying to show them is the power of the human mind to build hypotheses, and carry out experiments to test them. In the second half of the year we'll be learning more about how human's use of the scientific method has not only given us such wonderful advances, but also changed the very planet.”
So, parents, next time you are baffled by a scientific question from your little one, just say “Let’s ask Mrs. Tiller!” She will explain it all.
Have a natural science question for Mrs. Tiller? Ask it!
