Science for the English Teacher

My static electricity doll. One of the level 2 projects.

Every day during IP (Intensive Preschool) we have an hour devoted to various activities. These activities are meant to center on subjects other than English. I have been “teaching” “Science” for a month now, and will be continuing to do so in February. Why would I bother placing those words in quotations? Simple.

1. The material enables me to enable them to say, “Teacher fix. Teacher help. Teacher it won’t work. Teacher I can’t do. Teacher. Teacher. Teacher.” Classes usually end up with me crafting all the projects because they are generally too complex for the age group.
2. 3-7 year olds want to play with science, not understand what atoms or molecules are. Most of the time they don’t even have a basis for or large enough vocabulary to understand the vocabulary flash cards. These end up being unceremoniously dumped into the trash.
3. These projects are usually completed within the first 10-25 minutes of the class period. What do we do then? We color or complete word searches.

This isn’t meant to be a rant against science. I have always loved the subject and majored in one of the “soft sciences”, because I am not a lover of math. This is primarily about highlighting the disparities between the ages of my students, their English comprehension, motor skills, and the material provided. Project materials are broken up into monthly bags with level numbers. The problem is, I have found that my more knowledgeable students are given tasks that are too simplistic and my 5 year olds (essentially 3 in US standards) are given ones which are far more complex.

I have three levels of classes for my activity time; the majority of them are in the higher level IP classes. Two weeks ago, these older students put two pieces of circular cardboard together so they could see the phases of the moon during the course of 30 days. I kid you not that we all finished in the first 5-10 minutes of class. I even added some background on the phases of the moon, where and when we can see it, what colors it appears to be and asked them to find dates that aligned with a shape I drew on the board. 15-20 minutes of my hour? It was a long class.

Then last week, my tiny kids were supposed to learn about the diffusion of ink in warm and cold water. I’m sorry, what? These kids can’t even understand my English directions, let alone what they’re supposed to be learning about the project. I had to tell one boy over and over again to not drink the colored water. They were expected to use their own pipettes to insert colored water into another container and then put it into a cup of water. I did it myself since a few of them ended up chewing on the plastic and would likely have squirted their classmates given the opportunity. When the project was done, I had them all walk to the bathroom and repeated several times to put their water in the sink. I went with the little girl and took care of ours. I had to wait on the boys and when they came back, they still had their cups full of dyed water. Some even filled them up more. Cue the facepalm moment.

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