Abstract:

Children are natural explorers and enquirers of their respective environments. Exploring and experimenting through direct experience with materials and tools is a powerful pedagogical resource to promote active learning in children. The “Lab 0_6: Center for Discovery, Research and Documentation for Early Early Scientific Education" is a pedagogical space with free-choice proposals about science and created to allow the free exploration and experimentation so to approach science experimentation and processes to children from 0 to 6 years old. In this space different phenomena and proposals are presented to allow children discover, explore, compare, and enter into problem-solving situation related to scientific procedures. This paper presents a Research – Action process carried out by members of the GRENEA research group in the Lab0_6 minerals proposal. The aim is to show the changes made during this Research – Action process based on several aspects. A number of observations, analysis and subsequent improvements carried out for the proposal are presented up to one of its latest versions in which other Geological phenomena were progressively included. Although the materials presented (rocks, minerals, sand, ...) are a common resource in schools, they are often discarded by teachers as pedagogically useful. Observations of children interacting with this Lab0_6 Geology proposal, however, show that if these types of geological materials are presented and organised with pedagogical criteria and opportunities for hands-on interactions, they become useful resources for teachers in their schools, to promote the discovery of new things about geological or mineralogical phenomena.

Keywords:

Science, Direct experience, geology, minerals, hands on, free-choice proposals.