Teacher views regarding the science and nature activities implemented at pre-school educational institutes

Children are always deeply involved with science from the day they are born and they perform sensitive, active, curious, and investigative characteristics to their close proximity. These characteristics lead them to ask questions to understand the world and environment in which they live and direct them to build a relation between the causeseffects of the events they come across with. In order to support the developments of children in this way, satisfy their curiosity, and provide opportunities for their learning, arranging appropriate environments in pre-school educational institutions is of great importance. This is possible by conducting the science and nature activities in a scientific and systematic way. Well-planned science and nature activities will be helpful in contributing to cognitive, social, emotional, psychomotor, language, and aesthetic development fields of children, in gaining scientific process skills, which are also called as basic life skills, and scientific attitudes, and in achieving the goals planned in education in this way. In this respect, the function of science and nature activity in preschool educational programs is gaining importance. This study aimed at determining the teacher views regarding the function of science and nature activities implemented in the pre-school educational institutions. This is a survey study carried out in 16 primary schools affiliated with Ministry of Education in Eskisehir city centre in 2005-2006 educational year. 20 pre-school teachers were interviewed for the study. The data were obtained through semi-structured interview which is one of the qualitative data collection instrument. The data were analyzed descriptively and the data obtained were transformed into numerical terms. Later, the data were interpreted based on these numbers. The data obtained from the study suggest that all pre-school teachers think that science and nature activities are of great importance for children. The study revealed that most of the pre-school teachers think that these activities mostly contribute to cognitive and then social, psychomotor, language, and emotional developments of children respectively. In addition, it was found out that teachers taught opposite concepts more in science and nature activities; however, they did not put necessary effort in teaching the subjects that are difficult to teach such as sound, electricity, and light and they did not include the science and nature activities in their daily programs. The study revealed that within the scope of science and nature activities, the teachers conducted field trips, experiments, observations, plant growing and animal feeding activities; however, they rarely conducted studies such as baking a cake, making pickle, etc., playing with educational toys, benefiting from concept maps, and inviting a visitor to classroom all of which are within the scope of these activities. Moreover, it was found out that almost all of the teachers experienced some problems while implementing science and nature activities such as lack of materials, facing problems in organizing trips, crowded classrooms, inappropriate physical conditions of classrooms, problems originating from teachers, not allowing the use of resources in schools and pre-school teachers generated solutions to these problems according to themselves. In order to implement these activities as intended, the teachers made some suggestions such as conducting science and nature activities frequently, paying more attention to having genuine and sufficient number of materials, making science and nature corner effective and interesting, teachers? being willing, investigative and open to individual development, planning activities very carefully and conducting their pre-tests, carrying out in-service educational seminars for teachers, encouraging children to search, investigate and creativity by motivating their curiosity.