Wonderfully depicting children’s love for playfully discovering the natural world around them, the book encourages them to see things differently. Celebrate children’s enthusiasm for thinking outside the box by finding new functions for a stick, dreaming up different futures for a sea shell or imagining the adventures of a gumnut.
Combine children’s creativity and imagination with learning about the natural world and broadening their vocabulary by learning the animals’ names, making their conversations and observations more specific. Imagine is a wonderfully illustrated book with a sense of wonder and abundance of colour.
Celebrating children’s appreciation of nonsense and giving them the power to make adults say silly things, The Book With No Pictures bravely leaves the realm of the picture book behind and focuses on sound instead.
This funny rant by Warren, a koala who is sick of being called a bear, is a great reminder that it is important to use correct terminology when speaking to children. You can also try to introduce more scientific language into the children’s vocabulary, for example, by talking about what makes a koala a marsupial.
Possums’ trip across Australia to find out how to make Hush visible again is a wonderful illustration of the joys of inquiry-based learning. Through trial and error and true hands-on experiences, they find the answer to their question, How do we make Hush visible again…
Ada Twist is full of questions about the world she lives in. When she comes across a mystery, she learns all she can on the subject, then comes up with a hypothesis and tests it.
The book is such a lovely illustration of what we at Little Scientists believe in so firmly: Every child is curious and needs to be given the opportunity to learn about the world in a hands-on way.
The story of the Shark Lady is a great way to encourage children to find ways to pursue their dreams and their quest for knowledge. Eugenie Clark, the girl fascinated by her experiences at the aquarium, grows up to become the Shark Lady, discovering three new marine species and dispelling myths about sharks.
Dive into mathematician Paul Erdős’ life and experience his passion for numbers and solving problems. You can encourage the children to look for numbers and mathematical symbols in the text and illustrations. What rules do the children know? Which rules make them feel safe and which ones do they not like? Do they know any rules or patterns to do with numbers?
The children will notice that Freddy looks normal in size when Eddy is holding him but tiny in the bear’s hands. This is a great introduction to the mathematical concept of size. This is also a brilliant opportunity to combine STEM learning with promoting the children’s language development as they will be using their comparative and superlative adjectives of size: “How big is your teddy?” – “It’s bigger than yours. But’ Laura’s is the biggest.”
One of the educational pillars of our program is co-construction – where educators and children work together and collaborate to build knowledge. We like to use this book in our Water workshop to talk about how important it is to recognise a child’s developmental stage and prior knowledge to give them the best support in their cognitive development.