Using a sense of adventure to explore natural sciences in a preschool setting

This paper illustrates how you can teach basic map reading a geology to preschoolers through adventure. Adventure education has a strong foundation in the theories presented by Dewey and Duckworth (Prouty, Panicucci & Collinson, 2007). The focus of learning through personal experience and problem solving are key in designing educational activities. In a Swedish preschool setting, the social aspects of learning in adventure education are also essential as the children are often in mixed groups with a variety of ages and prior experiences. A good educational activity should therefore make use of the zone of proximal development, developed from the work of Lev Vygotskij, where the children can be aided by a more knowledgeable peer and challenge each other through cooperative learning (Doolittle, 1995).
Adventure education was used as a method to involve children of different ages in two separate activities. Both of these covered fossils and dinosaurs and they also contained aspects of map reading. In the first activity, the children worked together to find clues and tasks using a simple floor plan. Then they had to complete a variety of tasks that involved different skills. In the second activity, the children used an illustrative map where the façade of the houses were clearly recognizable to find fossils (Dessborn, Thulin & Fridberg, 2021). One of the hardest parts of planning and completing the activities was to include the youngest in tasks as the older children would solve problems much faster. One way to get around this was by taking turns. Another was by including tasks that some of the younger children would excel in. In my case, some of the youngest children had great knowledge of dinosaurs that the older children did not. However, the most successful way of including the youngest children was to develop tasks where the children took turns as assigned leaders with prior information which was shared through clues. That way the children all played an important part and the youngest were sometimes the most knowledgeable. In most Swedish preschool settings, the group composition is often varied due to large differences in age. The attendance is usually unpredictable as it is not compulsory, and absence due to temporary illness is frequent. This poses a challenge to educators as it is difficult to plan activities to match a wide variety of skills, experiences and developmental phases, especially when you are unable to know for sure which children will be attending the activity. The fossil treasure hunt illustrates how adventure education can be adapted to a varied group composition and still encourage cooperation and the development of skills and knowledge.

Dessborn, L., Thulin, S., & Fridberg, M. (2021). Att upptäcka naturvetenskap: i förskolan. Studentlitteratur AB.
Doolittle, P. E. (1997). Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development as a Theoretical Foundation for Cooperative Learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 8(1), 83-103.
Prouty, D., Panicucci, J., & Collinson, R. (2007). Adventure education: theory and applications. Human kinetics.