Last Saturday, ECHOS teachers and teacher assistants came to the Museum on a quest to become prepared to host the Head Start Museum Family Day. Both ECHOS and Head Start are all about creating environments for young children to learn and develop in a safe and educational environment. This workshop in particular focused on the upcoming Head Start Museum Family Day, as well as identifying new ways to involve parents in ECHOS activities – with the expectation that teachers would then incorporate these strategies at their respective centers. As part of their “Quest” at the workshop, teaching teams explored museum exhibits that had been selected by ECHOS staff to help deepen their understanding of science concepts that are presented across all 9 ECHOS units. Throughout their Quest, teams compared features of live birds at the Museum’s Wildlife Center, learned about shells and fossils with “Fossil Frank,” observed bees at work in our new Beehive exhibit installation, and were even challenged to estimate how many gallons of water are in the large fish tank in the Sea Lab. Three teams guessed the exact number of gallons, and won prizes. Can you guess how many gallons? Scroll down to the photo from the Sea Lab to find out! (The answer is in the caption.)

This teacher was fascinated by this horseshoe crab shell, which she had never seen before. Have you?

One of the quest challenges was to spell out your own initials using these movable magnetic gears.

Teachers observed bee pollen and butterfly legs through microscopes.

There are 3,000 gallons of water in that large tank! How close was your guess?

A week before children headed back to school, Head Start teachers were already getting re-energized for ECHOS at the first workshop of the year. The Museum’s Early Childhood Hands-On Science (ECHOS) initiative, in collaboration with the University of Miami’s Department of Psychology, is a comprehensive science curriculum and teacher professional development program being tested in 90 Head Start classrooms throughout Miami-Dade County. The project is funded by a grant from the US Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences. In ECHOS, children learn all about rain, birds, bees, plants, shells, blocks, water, air and magnets. And teachers learn effective ways to encourage scientific thinking in children, like wondering, observing, making predictions, doing experiments, and most importantly, asking questions! This ECHOS pre-service workshop focused on the idea of “productive questioning” and how to encourage scientific and creative thinking in young children. During the workshop, teachers experimented with some lessons and received new and updated lesson materials, which even included some “echoes” of their feedback from the previous year of implementation. Three more teacher training workshops are scheduled throughout the school year, in between lots of opportunities to use the science lessons and materials in the classroom.

Teachers explored simple science activities to learn how to engage children in science through productive questioning.

Teachers got picture cards with instructions to mingle and fit all cards into a big picture - just like each teacher is a part of the big ECHOS picture.