Eli’s Winter Day: Hands-on Science for Toddlers

At first glance, Eli’s Winter Day looks like what it is: a book about a really wonderful winter day full of great outdoor family activities that anyone would enjoy after receiving a generous snowfall. However, because my mind is so frequently occupied with what is going on with a child’s brain and how his experiences mold that brain, it suddenly hit me that there is a lot going on in this book we might not notice at first.

Science in the Classroom

I remember well squeezing science into the school day around the all-important focus on reading. While I did my best to locate hands-on experiences for science for my kids, frequently science lessons came out of a book and were pretty standard fare. Take the states of matter for example. Kindergarten standard 3.4 (PA) for physical science states: “Recognize that matter can change from one state to another.” The recommended activities include “Sort and classify common classroom materials or household items by solid, liquid or gas.”and “Conduct an experiment to convert different common liquids into solids by freezing them and recording results, such as, how long it took to change each substance from a liquid to a solid.” A typical way to get this standard covered might be to march the class to the school kitchen, take an ice cube tray, fill it with water, pop it into the freezer and come back the next day to find, eureka! that we have ice! What is even more engaging is to use juice and freeze it into icy pops for the kids to enjoy.

Science Firsthand

In Eli’s Winter Day, however, no one was discussing what happens when water gets cold. Eli was living it! He saw the snow fall, smelled it, ate it, crunched through it with his dino-rubber boots, lay in it, slid through it, packed it into snowballs, shoveled it, made tracks, and built a really great snowman. He felt its cold. Then he found an icicle and experienced the difference between the softness of the snow and the hefty, slickery icicle as he held it in his bare hands. He could see the drips melting off the end of the icicle.  Walking by the river showed him water in its original state. Eli’s whole being was immersed in the question of the various states of water.

Do We Need to Teach it?

I think a common unrecognized belief among parents and teachers is that unless we organize the material we want a child to learn, and unless we verbalize it, pointing out significant aspects of the experience, the child won’t learn it. But the really amazing thing about a child’s brain is that it is designed to take in data from the environment through the senses. Next it organizes all that random data and even if no one says a word (such as “states of matter”) even an 18 month old is capable of storing up a wealth of rich information about his world if he is given the opportunity to go out and experience it firsthand. In a perfect world, all our school topics would be taught from firsthand experience just like in this book.

The beauty of this book, like in the other Eli titles, is that we can see what it looks like when a toddler is experiencing something that will teach him richly and grow his brain and body in healthy ways.

Facilitating Learning

I remember in grad school being asked the question, “What is teaching, and what is learning?” I was a bit puzzled because I still thought pretty traditionally about the process of imparting learning to kids. I thought if I was a good teacher, I would do a superior job of “covering the material” we needed to teach the kids, I would organize it well, even teach to the modalities. What I didn’t really understand was that my most valuable contribution to my students would come in the form of providing them with firsthand experiences such as the ones modeled for us in Eli’s Books. The brain of a child is naturally ready to learn and will learn if conditions are right. The most difficult challenge about being a classroom teacher who is truly a facilitator of learning is that we are typically greatly limited in how many real life experiences we can offer our students. At home it is a totally different story. Parents can offer their children this type of rich opportunity to learn about the world firsthand. And hey! It’s summer! Not a great time for firsthand learning about the states of water, but it is a great time to learn about life cycles of plants and plant parts. Give your child a bean, a pot of soil and let him figure out biological sciences standard  (PA) 3.3 hands-on. “Identify the life processes of living things.” “Identify the basic needs necessary for plants and animals to survive.” “Document by drawing changes over time of trees or plants.” “Recognize from illustrations the process (sequence) of changes in some living things (butterfly, frog, plants from bulbs or seeds).”