🔎 Project information
- Project name: Blue! It sounds blue!
- Service: Froebel Carlton Early Learning Centre
- Award: Victorian Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
- Frequency: Several times a week for 3 months
- Number of children: 15
- Age of children: 0-3 years
💥 Project Summary
While playing with animal toys and sounds, the toddlers showed an interest in ocean toys in particular. The educators played animal sounds and after hearing the sounds of whales and dolphins, one child asked “What is that?” Other children continued with questions like “What do different ocean animals sound like?”, which sparked this three-months-long inquiry-based STEM project exploring the ocean and sea creatures.
💡 Collecting Ideas
The educators recognised that the toddlers needed time, space, repetition, and nurturing relationships to support them to share what they were thinking. The toddlers already knew the names of common sea animals and what they looked like. Many of the children visited the beach regularly and were familiar with some aspects of the ocean, such as “rubbish is not good” and “seashells go in the water”.
One educator noted down the children’s perspectives (such as short questions and non-verbal communication) and turned them into a mind map of ideas to explore so that each project stage could be built upon the toddlers’ prior and newly acquired knowledge.
🧪 Experimenting
While listening to a playlist of ocean noises, the children started to hypothesise which animal had made each sound. Some heard a gorilla, a whale, or a dolphin. Once they grew more familiar with the sounds, the children were given image clues and guessed what animals they were seeing and hearing.
The children and educators also used the medium of art to explore the ocean by creating a large-scale collaborative 2-metre canvas painting. This started with the children listening to ocean sounds and asking “What is that sound?”. Some children replied “It’s water!” and “It sounds blue”. As a result, a couple of toddlers ran to choose a colour palette based on the sounds, a combination of blue and green shades. The toddlers extended this beyond paint and opened cupboards to find paint, loose parts (including seashells), and sandpit resources for their painting.
During the project, the children also investigated the concept of ocean currents using hot and cold water in tubs. The educators provided them with red and blue water to represent the temperature and help to demonstrate the movement of currents. They also tested whether certain ocean-related toys, as well as different ingredients like salt, would sink or float in water.
In an important part of the project was an excursion to the beach. The toddlers packed their own bags with beach toys, books, and sun safety items. At the beach, the toddlers helped fill buckets with water and chose colours to then find on the beach. The children engaged in mathematical thinking: they described what seashells look and feel like, counted how many they could find, and classified them based on their attributes such as texture. The educators also encouraged the children to think about how to keep the oceans clean from rubbish and what belongs in the water.
VIC Winner: Excellence in Early STEM Education Awards 2024
This project was the 2024 VIC Winner of the Excellence in Early STEM Education Award as part of the Little Scientists Early STEM Education Awards. These biennial awards call upon early learning services and classrooms to nominate by submitting an inquiry-based STEM project co-developed with their children 0-8 years. Projects were judged on originality, STEM content, alignment to the inquiry cycle, child-led approach, and use of a gender lens.