In our modern society, children are confronted with technical tools and events from an early age. All these things originate in physics, physics. It is therefore not surprising that children ask questions at a very young age about physical aspects of the world around them. Depending on their age and the phase in which their physical thinking is in, choices can be made within the didactic plane for methods and lessons.
Physics for kids
Children are always learning. Sometimes directed, sometimes through play. While playing, while learning, they explore the world around them, learn to understand and know it. It is important that children are given the space to develop optimally, so that they can grow into full participants in society. In order to enable optimal learning and development, conditions must be created and the knowledge and skills to be learned must match the stage of life and the level of development the child is in. And that creates a framework within which education can be given shape, for example in education physics, or as it is called in elementary school today: Nature and technology.
Core objectives Nature and technology
The legislator has laid down in the attainment targets which knowledge and skills must have been acquired by the children at the end of primary school. For Nature and Technology it concerns core objectives 40 to 46:
40 | The students learn to distinguish and name common plants and animals in their own environment and learn how they function in their living environment. |
41 | The students learn about the construction of plants, animals and people and about the shape and function of their parts. |
42 | The students learn to research materials and physical phenomena, such as light, sound, electricity, force, magnetism and temperature. |
43 | The students learn how to describe weather and climate using temperature, precipitation and wind. |
44 | The students learn to make relationships between the effect, the form and the use of materials in products from their own environment. |
45 | The students learn to design, implement and evaluate solutions for technical problems. |
46 | The students learn that the position of the earth in relation to the sun causes seasons and day and night. |
Connecting with the kids
Achieving the attainment targets is an eight-year process, in which knowledge and skills can only be transferred if they fit the developmental level of children. In order for children to learn optimally, it is important to connect to their perception, their perception and the knowledge and skills they have.
The latter is immediately clear. You do not let a novice reader read a political piece or one of the great works of literature and you do not saddle a young child with relativity or quantum physics. You start with what the child knows and understands and expand their knowing and understanding from there. The child’s world of experience is in line with the current knowledge and understanding. The child’s understanding is based on his or her perceptions, on what has been seen, experienced and understood before. How does a child experience reality, how does his perception work? Can a child separate a physical observation from its magical experience, does the child fit such an observation into a fanciful interpretation?
The didactics
For education to be successful, it is important that the child’s age and ability to process events and observations are taken into account. It makes little sense in a toddler to explain a ray of light broken by a prism in the various colors of the rainbow by talking about refractive indexes and the like. The toddler sees the light and the colors and will discover what is happening while playing.
Development in stages
The young child is developing. From birth, the child acquires a lot of knowledge and skills and will explore his world through discovery. You could globally distinguish four phases. Keep in mind that the boundaries between these phases are diffuse and you can often identify characteristics of an adjacent phase in the phase before or after it.
Phase 1: From zero to four years
In this phase the child is self-centered. The child asks questions about the world that are mainly focused on themselves, their own well-being. In this phase, the child is the center of its own world. At this stage the distinction between animate and inanimate things is not clear. All objects that a child has to deal with have their own soul, their own experience. The doll feels pain when she falls, the car is happy when they are home. Inanimate objects can apparently feel and interact with living reality.
Phase 2: from four to eight years
In this phase the child also gets more for the objective aspect of the things around him. The things around him are there, but not necessarily because they are related to the child himself. The distinction between living and inanimate things becomes sharper, and the difference between the perception of humans and animals also becomes clearer. Yet even in this phase, the child can easily attribute human qualities to animals or things. Events are still explained because of the use they have for humans.
Phase 3: from nine to ten, eleven years
The phase of naive realism is characterized by the transition from egocentric thinking to a more objective thinking. The objects have their own reason for being. You see a transition from global perception to more analytical thinking. The world asks to be discovered, it goes beyond your own room, your own house or your own environment. Explanations of events still get stuck in a direct cause-effect. Why does the light turn on? Because I pressed the switch.
Phase 4: from eleven years old
In this phase, critical realism, the naive attitude towards the world around the child disappears. It is no longer just about things in themselves, but also about the relationship between things, people and events. In this phase, children really do research. Now the child is to go beyond perceiving individual parts, he can explore what the relationship is between everything and what can happen if that relationship or the aspects of one of the parties in it changes.
Towards a suitable offer
Of course the division into phases is as above schematic and global. Individual children develop in their own way and for example, one child can analyze relationships between parts as early as phase 3, and another child in that same phase is not or hardly ready for analytical thinking. Nevertheless, the classification in this phase offers guidance to teachers, parents and developers of educational methods in order to create a suitable offer, a living environment that challenges children to take steps forward and to get to know their world. And of course it is important to recognize individual differences and to respond to them.