Designing play-based learning chemistry activities in the preschool environment

Abstract

This study focuses on the design of play-based learning activities for chemistry in preschool. Viewing chemistry as a part of our past and present culture instead of as a subject, provides the backdrop for a more holistic approach to chemistry within this specific environment. A cultural-historical perspective, together with scaffolding, emergent science skills and sustained shared thinking, made up the framework for the design of the learning activities. Results show that when scaffolding and emergent science skills are used within the design, they provide good support for both the content and the teacher in the actual learning situation. Working with scaffolding was also beneficial for professional development. However, for a progressive and inclusive activity design, it is essential to take into account aspects of the immediate environment and methods for direct evaluation.

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Introduction

There is a growing interest in preschool education from a social economic point of view, as early education has been perceived as beneficial for long-term academic achievements (Sylva et al., 2004), especially for families of lower socioeconomic status (Heckman and Masterov, 2007). This also brings about an increasing interest in exploring what content is suitable for a preschool environment and how this could be realized within this specific setting. Today current research in the field is becoming increasingly more subject-specific with studies on topics such as physics (Herakleioti and Pantidos, 2015; Ravanis et al., 2013), robotics (Bers, 2010; Bers et al., 2014) and geoscience (Howitt et al., 2011). There is a lack of peer-reviewed literature in the field of chemistry and especially about how the perspective of chemistry can be realized within the preschool setting.

For this purpose, deriving subject-specific content for this educational level becomes a point of interest. This investigation was designed as a longitudinal study spanning over three years with the overall purpose to better understand children's emergent science and concept development when chemistry is introduced into a preschool setting. To achieve this purpose in a respectful manner, given the age of the participants (three years old when the study was launched), it was essential at the outset to derive chemical content relevant for preschool, while making sure that concepts remained connected within their framework. This first part of the study reported here is focused on the design and content of play-based learning activities. In order to design activities with chemistry content within this particular culture, where play, social interactions, history, affective connections and imagination make up the basic setting, the study places itself within the cultural-historical perspective (Fleer and Pramling, 2015).

The national context

This study was performed in the Swedish context, where care and education come together to form the concept of educare. Despite the intention of working with the home and nature in preschools, it was not until 1972 that natural science was formulated as an important part of the daily activities of the preschool (SOU 1972:26). In 1998 the first curriculum for this educational level was formulated containing only goals to strive for with subject-specific content. This curriculum has been revised (effective 1 July 2019) and now contains a stronger emphasis on teaching. One example of subject-specific goals for this educational level is to provide conditions for children to develop understanding of natural science, knowledge of plants and animals and simple chemical processes and physical phenomena (SOU, effective 2019; Skolverket, 2018). The teaching efforts for preschool in Sweden have historically (Socialstyrelsen 1987) been based on children's own explorations and interests (Thulin, 2015).

Indeed, early childhood science education can, in principle, be separated into different teacher-led efforts, namely, discovery learning and science as a cultural process. In the case of discovery learning (Fleer and Pramling, 2015), learning is considered to be a child-centred approach where the teacher's choice of activities stems from interpretations of the child's own questions and ideas. Critique raised against this approach is that interpretations are difficult and much is lost in the translation of the child's actions by the teacher (Fleer and Pramling, 2015). Another concern is that the teacher's use of this approach sometimes results in the child being left to her own exploration and not provided with active teacher support to further her experiences.

However, when learning is seen as a cultural process (Vygotsky, 2016), the teacher's choice of activities cannot be separated from learning situations. Here, learning is seen as achieved and motivated through the child's social interactions with the external world, as opposed to originating from the individual exploring his or her surroundings (as in the case of discovery learning). An important distinction between these two paradigms is that in the case of the cultural process, preschool is more teaching-centred (Fleer, 2010; Cutter-Mackenzie and Edwards, 2013; Siraj-Blatchford, 2009).

Teaching efforts within this educational level are mainly focused on helping children develop their everyday concepts, as they are seen as the starting point for further development. Everyday concepts have been defined by Fleer (2010) as “concepts imbedded in everyday situations, which support the child to undertake everyday things” (p. 48). Using everyday concepts as a starting point for development also calls for a differentiation between what is perceived as a word and what is perceived as a concept.

Within this study the differentiation made by Eshach and Fried (2005) is used. They argue that the distinction between a word and a concept is that a concept holds numerous different types of information, all of which contribute to a richer and more diverse understanding of the concept at hand. The authors illustrate this using “cat”, where “knowing the word cat and knowing the concept of cat are two different achievements … The concept, cat does not only consist of verbal information such as a cat is an animal with four legs, fur, etc., but also visual information … haptic information … aural information … olfactory information” (Eshach and Fried, 2005, p. 10). That is to say, the concept can also contain an image of a cat, the memory of the touch of a cat, the memory of the relative weight and claws of a cat, together with the sound of a cat and maybe even the smell of a cat. This differentiation between concepts and words is made in the present study.

Theoretical background

Why is science an important part of preschool?

Scientific concepts are here defined as “scientific concept formation that is planned or consciously considered by the early childhood teacher” (Fleer, 2010, p. 42). Scientific concepts hold additional meaning as described by Eshach and Fried (2005), and a scientific word can be just a word used without any further experience connected to the word. Although scientific concept formation at the preschool level may not necessarily entail what we would refer to as conventional science, the resulting scientific concepts and scientific words are here instead seen as “developmental precursors” (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009) to conventional science and are referred to as “emerging science” (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2002).

In preschool environments, emergent science is becoming increasingly important as it is recognised that science learning “cannot take place without the establishment of a long-term relationship between the world of science and the child” (Fleer, 2009a). Expanding children's vocabularies and developing their everyday concepts provides new ways for children to describe and understand their surrounding world, which is here seen as contributing to both imagination and creativity. If children have rich everyday experiences of the environment, they have more possibilities for imaginative and creative thought and action, that in turn provide them with more perspectives to use when viewing the world. As Vygotsky (2004) suggested, “imagination is based on our experiences while creativity is a function of our ability to combine experiences” (p. 9). A long-term relationship between the child and science is also beneficial since it helps in developing attitudes towards science (Fleer and Pramling, 2015, p. 64). Motives is the word used for describing this attitude when science becomes a natural part of a child's way of acting or thinking. Developing motives for science can be achieved when children are “actively encouraged to take part in science activities” (Fleer and Pramling, 2015, p. 31). Wonder, on the other hand, holds a personal and emotional component that together with experience “acts as a prism through which the world is experienced by the child” (Fleer and Pramling, 2015, p. 64). This emotional aspect is also of essence since it provides motivation and, therefore, improves learning outcomes (Cherniss et al., 2006) as well as supports the child's developing imagination (Hedegaard and Fleer, 2013). Fleer (2010) summarised the cultural-historical perspective as, “it seeks to examine scientific learning in relation to how everyday situations create scientific encounters that are emotionally charged and socially mediated in actions and activities”.

Play-based learning activities

In preschools, learning activities are intentionally framed in the form of play and as a natural part of the children's social sphere. Playful learning also provides a way to include emotions, while maintaining attention on the everyday situation of the child. Moving in and out of imaginary situations is another essential definition for this type of learning situation. Vygotsky (2016, p. 15) explained that “the creation of an imaginary situation is not a fortuitous fact in a child's life; its first consequence is the child's emancipation from situational constraints”. Consequently, the same moving in and out of imaginary situations from storytelling enables the child to move between abstract concepts and concrete situations. Some of the theoretical considerations taken into account for a play-based learning situation are sustained shared thinking, double move and a dialectal view on learning. In practice these considerations entail that a learning situation cannot be analysed without also analysing the result of the teacher's pedagogical perspective or “teacher's subjectivity” (Fleer and Pramling, 2015). Sustained shared thinking (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009) is a term used to describe the actual learning situation as a meeting of minds, or as a “contextual intersubjectivity” where teacher and child find mutual understanding and where learning can originate from everyday concepts, by co-construction (Hedegaard and Chaiklin, 2005). Moreover, they suggest that it is important that everyday concepts and scientific concepts are taken into consideration when planning for learning. The authors refer to this consideration as the so-called “double move” in teaching (Hedegaard and Chaiklin, 2005).

The teacher's role

There is currently a lack of discussion in the scientific literature concerning teaching and the teacher's role in preschool (Hedegaard and Chaiklin, 2005), especially on how to introduce theoretical and empirical knowledge into this setting. Even less is known about how concept formation occurs within the different science disciplines (Fleer, 2009a). Since learning here is seen as a development of everyday concepts, a part of the teacher's role becomes finding science in everyday actions or planning activities which include both of these perspectives. Imaginary situations have been found to be highly helpful for the teacher to “enter the child's conceptual space” and also to establish motives.

Other considerations that need to be made when designing an activity are “contextual intersubjectivity” and “conceptual intersubjectivity” (Fleer, 2010). This implies that it is not only vital to consider how material is introduced to the child, but also how the conceptual content fits into its own context as part of a knowledge system. “What is important for the success of a cultural-historical approach … is for the teacher to determine core concepts” (Fleer, 2010, p. 94), to connect concepts into their theoretical context. Studies have shown that preschool teachers in general are very good at finding science content in the everyday context of the preschool, but that the analysis made by the teacher often remains just an analysis that is difficult to transform into practice (Fleer, 2010).

Planning learning activities: considerations for a respectful teaching situation

There are a few methods that have been developed to support teacher planning of learning activities. One example of such a method is “scaffolding” (Tables 1 and 2). The method in its current form has been developed by Eshach et al. (2011). The idea of scaffolding originated from Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, i.e. the idea of teachers/adults helping the learner to succeed in a task beyond his reach. The approach is comprised of a set of seven strategies that include both the affective and cognitive domains and is seen as an “important tool for helping children move from inter-psychological functioning to intra-psychological functioning”. The following subcategories are used: task recruitment, reinforcement of children's self-esteem, clarification and goal orientation, task reduction, diagnosis and calibration, encouragement of higher-order thinking, language and withdrawal techniques (Eshach et al., 2011). Here scaffolding is seen as a series of highly useful considerations to apply in the design of conceptual play learning activities; see Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 Scaffolding in the affective domain (Reprinted with permission from Springer Nature)

	Subcategories	Descriptions of subcategories
(a) Task recruitment
1	Choosing a relevant topic	Draw on children's interest
2	Referring to children's own interests	Using topics raised by children, or what do you know about…? Or what would you like to know about…?
3	Referring to children's emotions	I want you to feel… See if you like…
(b) Reinforcing children's self esteem
4	Presenting children as experts	Telling the child that he/she is an expert
5	Commending children	That is very interesting…
6	Announcing children's names	Noticing the individual
7	Avoiding judgement	Do not reject ideas or answers even if they are wrong/irrelevant

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Table 2 Scaffolding in the cognitive domain (Reprinted with permission from Springer Nature)

	Subcategories	Descriptions of subcategories
(a) Clarification and goal orientation
1	Verbalising	Providing verbal explanations of the task
2	Repeating task description	Using same or different wording
3	Modelling	Showing how to do the task
4	Sharpening the focus of observation	Explaining what children should look at and focus on in the observation
5	Using similarities	Describing object/phenomenon by relating to another object and phenomenon having similar properties
6	Repeating children's answers	Repeating children's answers in the same or different wording so others understand
(b) Task reduction
7	Voicing the beginning of terms	Saying out loud the beginning of new terms
8	Providing parts of the answer	And letting the children finish the sentence
9	Purposely providing the wrong but close answer	Asking questions as statements…for example, placing one object on one side of a scale and when about to place an equal object on the other side of the scale, ask if the other side of the scale will be lower now
10	Providing gesture hints	As in the above example, teacher uses her hands to illustrate the two sides of the scale
11	Suggesting that children help one another
(c) Diagnosis and calibration
12	Checking previous knowledge	Asking questions that require knowledge gained from previous experience. Usually these are what/why questions
13	Asking for clarification	Asking children to explain the meaning of what they said
14	Changing task	In cases that children show difficulty dealing with a question/task, the teacher changes the wording or the question/task
(d) Encourage higher-order thinking language
15	Encouraging children's questioning	Directly asking children to pose questions
16	Avoiding answering/judging	Same as for the affective domain
17	Using thinking language	Using terms such as hypothesis, investigation, experiment, observation and so on
18	Asking hypothesis questions	If we put more (concentrated) liquid in, what will happen to the colour?
19	Asking questions requiring connecting between variables	Asking questions where the teacher refers to one variable and asks what will happen to the other variable?
20	Reflecting and metacognitive tasks	Asking children questions regarding the process they went through in gaining knowledge about a new topic they learned
(e) Withdrawal techniques
21	Using same/similar language in different activities
22	Using same/similar sequence of strategies	The scientific method “stop and think” what do we already know?

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The method is here seen as highly suitable for the preschool level and for the design of conceptual play learning activities as it includes both cognitive considerations, such as the reduction of variables to increase focus on the task at hand, and emotional variables that ensure contextual inter-subjectivity. To meet the demands for conceptual inter-subjectivity and to determine the important concepts in order to “give directions for pedagogical framing in concept formation” (Fleer, 2010, p. 93) the core concepts and the “culture” of chemistry need to be taken into consideration.

The “culture” or conceptual content of chemistry

Chemists adopt a special perspective on their surrounding world, perceiving it as composed of particles of various sizes that are in perpetual motion and that take part in processes of arrangement and rearrangement (assembly and disassembly). Core concepts for this perspective can be defined as: Matter is composed of tiny invisible particles, particles are of different size and composition, and all particles have movement. For centuries, chemists have developed various means to differentiate the types of particles, both in theory and in practice. Chemists use their specific methods and have to some extent their own language. There are numerous skills and certain theoretical knowledge that are important for being able to understand, use and communicate chemistry. This necessitates that a degree of understanding of this culture is important in order to develop more holistic approaches towards chemistry teaching, in general, and here, for the design of conceptual play chemistry activities. Of the many different methods used by chemists, those that are simpler and more common are considered those most accessible to children. This short description of what is perceived as the “culture” of chemistry begins with the most universal learning that takes place in science in general and chemistry in particular, i.e. learning how to do science.

Emergent science skills, general for the natural sciences

Emergent science skills that are essential for the natural sciences in general, and for chemistry especially, have been proposed by Johnston (2014) and are termed “emergent science skills”. These emergent science skills include observation skills, classifying skills, raising questions, planning skills, predicting, handling variables, hypothesising, recording skills, writing reports, drawing pictures and diagrams, analysing, concluding, and communication, etc. Of these emergent science skills, those most relevant to preschool science are presented in Table 3.

Table 3 Examples of emergent science skills

Observation	Making use of all senses (including bodily memory and balance)
	The identification of similarities and dissimilarities
	Finding connections in and between everyday objects and Science
	Interpreting observations
Classification	Categorising items using one criterion
	Re-categorising items using more than one criterion
	Categorising items using several criteria at the same time
Prediction	Predicting events
	Constructing evidence-based predictions
	Realising that previous erroneous predictions can support future accurate predictions
Analysis	Verbalising events experienced in experiments and explorations
	Using/developing scientific language in explanations
	Using everyday and scientific language for explaining observed events

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Suggestions for chemistry methods and theoretical content

Many physical methods for manipulating matter such as mortaring, stirring and different types of separation methods, such as filtering, evaporation, sedimentation and solubility, are seen as suitable for this specific setting and can be found in Table 4. In addition to these, phenomena such as dissolving, freezing, melting, and boiling are not only central for the culture of chemistry, but can also easily be implemented in this specific environment as they are not only useful for the outdoor playground, but also they are used extensively indoors, mainly in the kitchen. Collectively, these provide examples of chemical content and subject-specific skills with associated theoretical conceptual knowledge.

Table 4 An example of chemistry skills derived for reasons of conceptual inter-subjectivity

Focus	Chemistry skills
Material	Recognising that different materials are made of smaller particles.
	Using the words small and big or gestures to make the differentiation.
Filtering	Using the word filtering
	Recognising that there are particles of different sizes
	Recognising what a filter does, recognising that there are many different filter sizes
	Being able to select filter size for the task at hand
	Recognising that there are particles that are so small that they cannot be filtered (through filters of everyday use)
	Recognising that there are particles that are so small that they are invisible, finding different types of filters in the immediate environment
Mortaring	Using the word mortar
	Using the mortar in the intended way
	Realising that matter can be divided
	Finding different items that can be used for dividing matter
	Realising the effect of mortaring on solubility or extraction
	Recognising the use of mortaring in everyday situations
Dissolving	Using the word dissolving
	Recognising that there are differences in solubility between substances
	Recognising that substances do not disappear when dissolved
	Realising that substances are spread in all of the liquid
	Recognising that substances spread in all of the liquid even if we do not stir
	Realising that particles have movement
Stirring	Using the word stirring
	Recognising that stirring increases the speed of dissolving
Evaporation	Recognising that liquid turns to (air) gas
	Recognising that different substances turn to gas at different temperatures
	Recognising that there are different substances dissolved in the liquid even if we don’t see them

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Pedagogical framing for core concepts

Practical as well as theoretical knowledge can be derived, and both are deemed necessary here in order for the pedagogical framing to lead towards the core components. Note that although the skills are sorted here into some form of order, it is by no means suggested that this is the order for concept development, but it does provide a definition and conceptual context for the intended chemistry content of the activities.

Aside from the above methods, the emergent science skills as defined by Johnston (2014) were intended to contribute to the pedagogical framing. For example, observation skills such as, “using all senses” also contributed to the differentiation of substances through taste, smell, texture and visual descriptions, including optical aids such as magnifying glasses. A different approach for deciding on chemical content has been suggested by Areljung (2017), such as design by making use of verbs, for example, mixing, stirring, separating, absorbing, gluing, sticking, dying, melting, freezing, evaporating and condensing.

Purpose and aims

Today there is a growing interest in preschool education, with a stronger emphasis on education. This necessitates understanding the mechanisms underlying how subject-specific concepts can be developed within this educational level. Not only is there a lack of peer-reviewed literature in the field of preschool chemistry, (a web search including both ERIC and Web of science, using preschool and chemistry as search words, yielded two publications with focus on children's views on chemistry, search performed 20181022) there are also very few studies deriving what chemistry content is suitable for a preschool environment. This lack of studies clearly justifies the need for research to investigate the subject-specific concept development associated with the introduction of chemistry. The above theoretical background describes an idealised learning situation for a preschool environment. Implementing the concepts of contextual inter-subjectivity, sustained shared thinking or collective minds, the double move of including both everyday concepts and science concepts, with conceptual inter-subjectivity and emergent skills into a learning situation based on “conceptual play” (Fleer, 2017), ideally requires a strategy that supports the inclusion of all of these considerations.

The purpose of this study was to:

– design play-based learning activities with theoretical chemistry content and chemistry skills for the preschool environment.

– evaluate activities using the quality markers for play-based learning.

Methods

Context

A preschool located in a town in southeastern Sweden participated in the study. This small preschool had no special intention of focusing on natural science or technology. Four children, all native Swedish speakers, were included in this first part of the study. The daily routine of the preschool consisted of an early morning, an initial period of free-play after which breakfast was served, then circle-time where the structure and content of the day was outlined, followed by either classwork with the current theme or an outdoor excursion until lunch time. During the afternoon, there was a period of rest, after which the children spent a large part of the remaining day outside if the weather permitted.

The preschool had a back garden with a play area, a workshop for outdoor toys and a carpentry shop with tools and paint brushes. The indoor environment included what can be seen as four different rooms, divided into different areas. One room had a sofa for relaxing and reading books, and a play-area with clothes for dressing up, as well as toys and construction items. There was another large room for more physical games. The third room was divided into one secluded area for arts and crafts, and one more open area that could serve as an extension to the arts and crafts area, but was also used for serving meals. Since the preschool had a cook, there was also a kitchen directly connected to the arts and crafts room.

The town where the preschool was located was semirural, and the children participating in the study were all native Swedish speakers. For the initial testing of the instrument, a group of four three-year-olds (n = 4) agreed to participate (two boys and two girls). Ethical approval for participating in the study, terminating participation, making videorecordings and publishing findings was obtained from the national ethical board, dean, staff and parents. To ensure approval from the children, ordinary staff, who knew the children well, were present at all times. Care was taken to ensure the anonymity of the preschool as well as the children. Data was collected during a four-week period twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the average activity was 20–30 minutes long.

Preschools are here viewed as micro-cultures, all unique due to context, resources, focus, staff, parents and children. As the knowledge that comes to the fore in all preschool activities is dependent on all active parties, data collection cannot be separated from these micro-cultural processes themselves. Since the purpose of this project was the design of activities, there was a need for flexibility between activities. Therefore it became important for the researcher to be also a teacher and participant in the play. The project takes inspiration from video-ethnography as “a way of researching from the perspective of being a part of an environment rather than from that of asking someone to tell you about it in spoken words” (Pink, 2014, p. 106). Video-analysis also includes data in the form of body-language, something of great importance when working with children ages three to five years old, where body language is an important way of communicating and provides data that the children cannot yet verbalise. Also, the dynamics and swiftness of change of focus in a group of three-year-old children requires videorecordings for more detailed analysis. Participatory data collection allows for exploring the process of learning as a collective effort (Pink, 2014). Ethnography especially considers all different kinds of knowledge, and all different kinds of data are included such as drawings, photos and artwork. Analysis (the organisation) of data is a continuous process that is initiated immediately as data collection begins. The teacher/researcher in this case is an educated preschool teacher, who also holds a Master degree in developmental psychology.

Design of chemical content and emergent science skills

An instrument for designing learning activities was developed with the intention of maintaining both contextual and conceptual inter-subjectivity. The content of the activities was a combination of relevant emerging science skills, as derived from Johnston (2014), together with the chemistry skills suggested above (in Table 4). This content is summarised in Fig. 2.

The theoretical chemistry, i.e. the chemistry concepts behind the practical methods, is not described here, but can be found in Table 4. In addition, only the headlines of the emergent science skills are included here; for further content, see Table 4. Suggestions for educational tools in activities are also included. The core concept is displayed in the middle of the image (Fig. 2) as it is in focus for all practical methods and connects directly to most of the emergent skills.

Considerations for the individual teacher

Scaffolding by Eshach et al. (2011) was turned into an observation protocol. Activities were recorded, and the observation protocol was implemented over all activities (eight activities). All the scaffolding considerations that the teacher naturally included in the activities were then eliminated. The remaining considerations were included in the individual activities. Considerations remaining from scaffolding include choosing a relevant topic, repeating task description, using similarities, task reduction, purposely providing the wrong but close answer, changing task and encouraging higher-order thinking. These considerations were then implemented into the design of the individual activities. The choice of topic was made during the initial preparation, which included a two-week period of child observation. The children showed interest in role-play that included kings, knights, princesses and queens. For this reason, the choice was made of using the king and his birthday as a lesson frame for this specific group of children.

Example of an individual activity

For example, observation skills (using all senses) and classifying were in focus for the initial series of activities. For this series of activities from Fig. 2, different materials were examined using our senses and a magnifying glass. For the first activity, the king had just had his birthday and wanted something special as a present. The story ended with the king being given a magnifying glass and a snow flake. Scientific concepts introduced were magnification, small and big, and the choice of educational tool was a magnifying glass (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 An example of an individual activity design including emergent science skills and the remaining considerations from scaffolding.

Fig. 2 A summary of chemistry content and emergent science skills used for planning activities, where the core concept, in this case “all things are made of small particles”, is displayed in dark grey. The light grey area summarises the practical chemistry methods and educational tools used in the different activities. Emerging science skills are found around the periphery.

Within each of the activities, the core content that all things are made of small particles was in focus.

Analysis

Video analysis

Data consisting of 129 minutes of videorecordings of seven different sessions were analysed using the software ELAN 5.1, which is a tool designed for video analysis created by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Videos were transcribed within the programme, and categories and their duration times were marked using seconds. The programme allows for marking duration times in milliseconds; these were then rounded off to seconds in order to facilitate statistical analysis. This process included both authors. Transcriptions were made in Swedish; the excerpts included in this publication have been translated into English, and both authors were included in the process. One author is a native Spanish speaker, fluent in Swedish, and an educated English teacher. The first author is a native Swedish speaker. Translations have been validated by a third person fluent in both languages. Excerpts in the original language can be found in Appendix 1. It is here recognised that translation is not always a straightforward process and that there is always a degree of approximation in the procedure.

The main content of the activities for the sessions presented here involved mainly observation skills. As the children were three years old and had a limited language repertoire, a simplification of the content of discussions and body language was made, such that all of the content, including body language gestures, were seen as either belonging to everyday word/concept or science word/concept. An example of an everyday concept expressed by body language was the connection between movement and snowflakes that came up during the first session. All children recognised a picture of a snowflake and when they were asked to show snowflakes, some children fell to the ground and some started running across the room being snowflakes in a snowstorm.

Categories for the quality markers for play-based learning activities (Fleer and Pramling, 2015) were made together with focus and interruptions as a separate category. In all, 10 different categories were developed (see Table 5).

Table 5 Definitions of the categorisations with examples

Category	Definitions	Example
Creating common ground within interruptions (teacher)	The teacher purposely tries to redirect children's attention towards the activity	“Do you remember why we are doing this?”
Narrator (teacher)	Moments when the teacher leads the session	Telling a story, asking questions…
Science (teacher)	Moments when the teacher specifically introduces scientific words or concepts	“This is a magnifying glass and we use it for looking at very small things.”
Affective imagination (children)	Combines imagination emotionally connected with feelings	“It looks maybe… like strawberries. I love strawberries!”
In/out of Imagination (children)	“Flickering” between reality and fantasy	“That is not a real man, it is just a statue!”
Collective mind (children + teacher)	Collective discussions, common ground	“It is a tea bag. Do your parents drink tea? Yes!”
Everyday word (children)	Word meaning not established or word meaning established	Cat or chair either pointing at a cat or a chair or just using the word
Everyday concept (children)	Involves (or contains) everyday content. Shows meaning and additional experiences.	“Jump! Falling!
		Once I fell down and hurt myself, I got a bandage. If you climb high, you can hurt yourself.”

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Focus describes the times when all children were focused on the activity at hand, and interruptions marked a complete non-activity related change of focus such as “my grandfather is coming to see me” or leaving the activity to dance for a while. The choice of using interruptions as a category was made to allow for evaluating what types of activities caught these children's attention.

Teacher narrator was another category that is seen as a quality marker for play-based learning. This category includes the moments when the teacher is leading the activity through storytelling or asking questions. Science (teacher) is a transformation of what Fleer refers to as “science models” and includes those moments when the teacher “makes science visible” (Fleer, 2009b). The transformation was made only for the purpose of separating science introduced by the teacher from science introduced by children.

Affective imagination describes those moments that include emotions together with scientific concepts, scientific words, everyday concepts, or everyday words. Imagination is here seen as depending on everyday concepts or words (Vygotsky, 2004).

Collective mind, or common ground, describes the moments where all parties were focused on and discussed the same thing, as a meeting of minds. Creating common ground is a category added to analyse how many times and how the teacher/researcher drew the children's attention back after interruptions. Sustained shared science thinking or co-construction of scientific knowledge is here seen as a combination of scientific concepts and collective mind.

Content (children) was defined as children's everyday and scientific concepts or words. Examples are provided in Table 5. Here, only the conversations of children are included; blanks show pauses in conversation. As science skills are integrated into what is here referred to as science, observation skills such as defining flavours as sweet or salty are also classified here as scientific words.

The categorisations more focused on content were then further evaluated in the analysis as described in Table 6. It was here essential to determine if sustained shared thinking or sustained science thinking was indeed achieved.

Table 6 Combined analysis of the content and learning situation

Category	Content of category	Code	Combination of category and content
Interruptions	Focus on non-related issue	0
	Focus on activity	1
	Creating common ground	2
Affective imagination (children)	No affective imagination	0
	Affective imagination	1
In/out of imagination (children)	Out of imagination	0
	In imagination	1
Content (children)	—	0
	Everyday word	1
	Everyday concept	2
	Science word	3
	Science concept	4
Collective mind (teacher + children)	—	0
	Everyday word	1	Sustained shared thinking
	Everyday concept	2	Sustained shared science thinking
	Science word	3
	Science concept	4
Narrator (teacher)	No everyday concept	0
	Everyday concept	1
Science (teacher)	No science concept	0
	Science concept	1

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After categorisation and marking duration times, the categories were scored with either zero or one. One meant successful. For example, the number one for the category of focus meant that focus was obtained. The number zero meant that focus was lost. The exception to this valuation was content (children) and collective mind where all received a number each; see (Table 6). For this particular evaluation, no additional quality judgements (except for 1 and 0) were made. Duration times were then transferred to Excel, where each segment was compared to the duration of the entire session and percentages of the segments were calculated. These percentages were then transferred to Python.org (2019), a programming language that transformed the calculated percentages into graphs.

Results

The different activities and their duration times are presented below in Table 7.

Table 7 Descriptions of the sessions with their location and duration times

Session description	Location	Duration (minutes)
The story of the king	Sofa	9
Magnifying glass	Arts and crafts area	9
Macro-pictures and collected items	Arts and crafts area	9
Drawing, finding the sugar	Dining area	35
Tasting the white powders	Dining area	25
Filtering	Activity area	22
Making chocolate balls, filtering	Activity area	20

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The sets of data were analysed for Focus, here visualised with the colour green and Interruptions, here marked in purple. These two points of analysis were made to find out if the design did indeed capture the children's interest (Fig. 3). Added to this analysis is the category of Creating common ground, marked with orange.

Fig. 3 Temporal analysis of the initial sessions.

A high percentage of focus was observed for the different activities. In Session 5, role-play including facial paint was introduced. A higher number of interruptions were observed during this activity and were mainly due to the children arguing over the different kinds of paint or partaking in play jousting. As Fig. 3 shows, sometimes the children themselves returned their focus to the activity at hand and other times, here marked in orange, the teacher/researcher recaptured their interest mainly through asking questions. Results for the category imagination are not displayed in the following summaries, though when comparing the category of “affective imagination” to “moving in and out of imagination”, the discrepancy between the two shows imagination without clearly expressed emotions.

Summaries of results from Sessions 3, 4 and 5 are shown below in Fig. 4–6. These three represent the sessions with the highest, lowest and the average focus time. For all three sessions presented below, only the categories of collective mind and children's content include all four codes, as displayed in Table 6. The colour codes for these two categories are displayed below each of the sessions.

Fig. 4 Categorisations of the quality markers for conceptual play and their relative duration times as a percentage of the entire session are displayed. Example provided from Session 3.

Fig. 5 Categorisations of the quality markers for conceptual play and their relative duration times as a percentage of the entire session are displayed. Example provided from Session 4.

Fig. 6 Categorisations of the quality markers for conceptual play and their relative duration times as a percentage of the entire session are displayed. Example provided from Session 5.

Description of Session 3

For Session 3, (Fig. 4) visualised above, the teacher was introducing the task at hand holding a short introduction to recollect what had been done in the previous session. When comparing the category of children's everyday and scientific with teacher narrator, the overlap between the two quality markers shows the fluidity of the discussions between the teacher and the children (see the narrow lines to the left-hand side in Fig. 4). Note that gaps in the category of teacher narrator show the times when the children are narrators. This provides insight into the dynamics of contributions to the discussion and differences in teacher guidance between activities. Note that teacher guidance could here, for example, be telling a story. In and out of imagination shows the children's contributions to the discussion through connecting everyday and science concepts. The emotional aspect of imagination was not always present. Also, the science words that the children used in their recollections of the last activity are visualised. One science concept introduced by children occurred in Session 4 and was a result of recollecting previous activities. In approximately the middle of the session, the teacher used a science concept and sustained shared science thinking took place for a short period, as the categories of collective mind, science teacher together with children's content coincided. During this session, there was only one interruption from the activity at hand. Although collective mind was easily established, the majority of the sustained shared thinking was in fact not science-related during this session.

Affective imagination occurred less frequently and was found difficult to maintain over all of the activities (which can be seen in all three of the activities presented here). The children began working with the actual task and they moved out of play as they were no longer princesses or princes, although actively participating in the task at hand. When analysing affective imagination and in and out of imagination for this session, both categories were less frequent. After the initial analysis, the reason for this was found to be partly contextual, since the children had been taught to be careful, and not to play, in the arts and craft area. Maria addresses the issue, “We don’t play here” (referring to the arts and crafts area).

Description of Session 4

In Session 4, (Fig. 5) there was an introduction with a brief story that sets the goal for the session. In this case, the king was baking a birthday cake; unfortunately he had misplaced the sugar. All the royal family (the children) were asked to help the king find his sugar. The children were asked guiding questions on how to perform the task, followed by directives to describe the appearance and taste of the different samples. The children's descriptions provided a plethora of everyday concepts, such as it tastes “like sweets” or it is “invisible” as a description of the crystals in sugar being see-through. Here descriptions like sweet and salty were defined as scientific concepts (see emergent science skills). Again, the fluidity of the discussion and the children's own contributions are visualised when comparing the categories of teacher narrator and children's content. The children used many science words/concepts in this session. This was mainly due to the fact that the different tastes and visual descriptors were relatively easy to verbalise. Affective imagination and science (teacher) overlap only once during this session, in contrast to affective imagination and everyday concepts or words showing that it is easier for children to connect emotions to everyday concepts and words. For this activity a very high focus time (97%) was obtained (see Fig. 3).

Description of Session 5

Session 5 (Fig. 6) also consisted of hands-on experimenting, which included dress-up with face-painting. This was done in an attempt to increase the instances of affective imagination. Unfortunately, this meant that one of the key elements of the scaffolding strategy, namely “task reduction”, was impossible. This activity held the lowest focus time, namely 70%. The teacher refocused the children by asking questions such as, why are we looking for the sugar here? (teacher narrator). The children quickly remembered it was for the king's birthday cake.

Teacher/researcher – Ok, maybe, but we need the sugar for whom?

Maria – For the cake.

Teacher/researcher – For whose cake?

John – The king's cake!

This activity also included dissolving, as one way to differentiate the white powders from each other. The teacher asked guided questions to make the children hypothesise about what happens to the sugar when dissolved into water, and one child answered:

Teacher/researcher – Is the powder gone?

John – Ah.

Teacher/researcher – But, where did it go? Have you seen it?

John – They went in between each other (sugar and water, author's note).

When analysing data for creating common ground or collective mind, we found that the story of the king was indeed helpful for a meeting of minds, but equally useful were recollections of activities or questions concerning science content or everyday concepts. The topic of birthdays was easy to relate to, and everyday concepts were frequently reoccurring as the children picked up on each other's comments and extended them with their own experiences.

Discussion

Teaching as a cultural process

The study set out to design conceptual play or, in other words, create a play-based learning situation where learning is seen from a cultural perspective and where the teacher functions as a narrator and a valuable part of the activity itself. A key factor for learning at this educational level is the focus on the affective domain. As results show, introducing scientific activities with their words and concepts into this environment requires teacher guidance to further the scientific content of the discussion, maintain focus (creating common ground), reduce variables and single out important details. The children themselves (ranging from three years old to three and a half years old) introduced scientific concepts only in one session. This may possibly have been due to the state of their language development, which further strengthens the argument for teacher-guided efforts over discovery learning as active teacher support is imperative for our young learners’ word and conceptual development. With the use of teacher-guided questions, the children in this study showed understanding of, and were able to identify, the theoretical underpinnings of the phenomena at hand (see concept form dissolving). Another argument for the importance of teacher-guided activities is that the dynamics and unpredictability of this particular environment, with its continuous flow of everyday words, concepts and interruptions, requires a highly skilled discussion leader so as to create a respectful learning environment and to maintain balance between working in both the affective and cognitive domains.

Scaffolding as a tool for professional development

Using scaffolding as an observation protocol placed focus on the individual teacher and proved to be very useful for highlighting teacher strengths and for providing a way to include individual teacher support into the activity design. Results suggest that when scaffolding is used as an observation protocol, it can be not only a highly useful tool for individual activity design, but also a basis for professional development, something, to the best of our knowledge, not previously described in literature.

Quality markers as an evaluation of activities

Using ELAN 5.1 provided an important visual description of the dynamics of a learning situation with young children. It showed the flexibility and swiftness of changes and how everyday and scientific concepts are intertwined within this setting. Affective imagination was difficult to achieve (see Fig. 4 and 5). One of the obvious obstacles for this was found to be in the immediate environment. In the art and crafts area of the preschool, the children had learnt to pause their play, pick a seat, and sit down and focus on doing other things than playing, which shows the importance of the micro-culture for this particular preschool. Possible explanations for the failure to maintain affective imagination during the sessions, despite efforts of choosing characters, dressing up and helping the king, can only be speculated on and will not be further addressed here. Despite failing to maintain affective imagination, this was, in fact, not a hindrance for the commitment and interest that the children displayed. Instead, the activity at hand caught their attention and for some reason the story of the king faded into the background. This may partially be due to the concept of wonder. The interest and eagerness that the children displayed did include personal emotions and excitement over the outcome of the activity. A better definition of the affective imagination these children displayed would be affective action. They were clearly emotionally engaged in the activity, and the eagerness to see the result could be compared to the definition of wonder.

As previously mentioned, the state of the children's language development limited their contributions to the category of children's content. Science (teacher) concepts were few in these activities, and this was partially due to the decision to create further experiences and develop word understanding for observation skills. Analysing children's science concepts or words and how they appear between activities lies beyond the scope of this part of the study. Nonetheless, observation skills were easily adopted and implemented to such an extent that it became difficult to separate them from everyday concepts and they were frequently reoccurring in-between activities. This shows how easily motive can be founded at this level of education. Sustained shared thinking was easily established, although sustained shared science thinking was more difficult to achieve, mainly due to the focus on observation skills. The foundations for higher-order thinking or theoretical knowledge are described by Vygotsky (2004) as dependent on being able to move between the abstract and the concrete. The analysis of the category of in and out of imagination did show a natural flow of connections between everyday and science concepts, suggesting that these children were indeed well in the process of creating theoretical knowledge.

Does chemistry have a place in the preschool environment?

The other intention of the initial part of this study was to establish a set of considerations for use in practical activity design involving theoretical chemistry content. Choosing the core concepts and merging emergent science skills with practical chemistry methods provided a way to explore in a natural way the theoretical chemistry concepts underlying the often implicit practical chemistry methods. The specific emergent science skills chosen for this part of the study were observation skills, which the children related to, as reflected in their easily maintained focus. The exception was Session 5, in which too many variables were included. The results presented here show that theoretical chemistry indeed has a place in the preschool environment as the theoretical underpinnings of the practical methods are easily understood by three-year-olds, who themselves deduced that sugar does not disappear when dissolving it in water; instead the water and the sugar “go in between”. These findings provide a new perspective on what chemistry content is suitable in the preschool environment. Results also show that more mechanical processes, for example filtering, can be easily understood, although verbalising the word filtering for these children was much more difficult.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts to declare.

Appendix 1

Session 3 excerpts in original language (Swedish):

Vi leker inte här

Session 4 excerpts in original language (Swedish):

Som godis

osynlig

Session 5 excerpts in original language (Swedish):

Lärare/Forskaren – Ok, kanske, men vi behöver sockret, till vem?

Maria – För tårtan

Lärare/forskare – Vems tårta?

John – Kungens tårta!

Läraren/Forskaren – Är pulvret borta?

John – Ah.

Lärarn/Forskaren – Men vart tog det vägen? Har du sett det?

John – De gick mellan varann (sockret och vattnet)

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the participation of the children, pedagogues and parents from the preschool involved in the study. Many thanks to Dr Annika Andersson (Linnaeus University) for getting us in contact with Dr Maria Graziano (Lund University) who helped us with ELAN 5.1., Prof. Christina Ottander and her colleagues (Umeå University) for their helpful feedback, Prof. Marilyn Fleer for facilitating our contact with Monash University and Dr Nikolai Veresov (Monash University) for allowing our participation in his reading group. This pilot study was funded and administered through Linnaeus University and received financial support from the Crafoord Foundation. Tables 1 and 2 reprinted with permission from Springer Nature: Journal of Science Education and Technology. Eshach, H., Dor-Ziderman, Y., Yael, A., Copyright, 2011.

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