The Buoyancy Preconceptions Of 3～6 Year-Old Children And Its'Implications For Early Children Science Education

Since the 20th century, more and more researchers around the world attention to children's original understanding, and constantly reveals their cognitive ability beyond people's imagination, our kindergarten education also stresses the need to regard the infants'experience as a foundation. However, in real life, people easy to underestimate children unconsciously, and not really discover their experience. This research attempts to discover the preconceptions about"buoyancy"of children, so as to make efforts to further understand children and reflect on the existing teaching in kindergarten.This study interviews 48 children selected from three classroom groups in a kindergarten of Chengdu by means of creating scene, to explore their status quo of the cognition about ups and downs and buoyancy; interviews preschool teachers in order to obtain their idea of relevant teaching.This research shows: the 3～6 years old children tend to believe that the object's weight, size and amount of water is the main reasons of"coming up","flotation","sinking","suspending", judge the existence, direction and magnitude of the buoyancy according to the object's state in the water(motion state, relative position, etc), which is also affected by the understanding of the relationship between object and water; preschool teachers are widely considered that the contents of preschool science education should be from children's life, children should explore initiatively in teaching, the process of the exploration deserves more attention, their emotional and attitude target should be given priority, children needn't to learn the core scientific concept, and the role of science education in preschool is to let the children get rich experience about science; existing teaching about"ups and downs"phenomenon doesn't involve related concepts. Based on the research findings, the researcher made some scientific thinking on preschool education, for example, whether teaching can involve"buoyancy", the problem in existing teaching, etc; attempted to put forward some suggestions:"ups and downs"teaching activities need to elaborate prepare materials, children should be given enough time to experience fully, etc.