With the drive of reading and math being core instruction Science education is often pushed aside. Science is important for a multitude of reasons for your children and can motivate your reluctant reader. Science is a part of our daily lives, everything we do and deal with is science from cooking, playing ball, growing a garden and understanding how technologies work to watching snow fall. Understanding science will help your child appreciate and relate to the world around them. Jean Piaget, one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the twentieth century, spent hours observing children at play. He concluded that play lifts children’s thinking to a higher level and helps them make sense of social experiences.

 

Holiday gifts are a perfect way to get kids interested in science; opening a gift sparks their natural curiosity. Science education fuels that curiosity and provides children with valuable ideas, skills, and potential future career choices. The role of play in helping children make sense of relationships was also explored by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In the essay Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, first presented as a lecture in 1907, he drew comparisons between children’s make-believe play and creative writing: ‘The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?’ (Freud 1908: 143).

 

Children are fascinated about earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, and tsunamis, I have seen reluctant students grow into passionate scientists sitting and reading about volcanoes for hours.   Children with a basic understanding of rocks and minerals are able to translate that knowledge to a wide variety of activities and potential. Children love to collect rocks!

Happy Shopping,

R.R.Cratty

**Slide show below contains over 30 science gift ideas from Beyond the Blackboard