Interacting with nature at an early age contributes to the development of the individual’s awareness, commitment, love and development of nature, ecological responsibilities. Science and nature education turns into an enjoyable curiosity. From this point of view, this main purpose is to examine the condition in early childhood of the perceptions of living and non-living beings of children aged five to six. The study has been handled with a qualitative treatment. Therefore, in this study, it was tried to determine the perceptions of children between the ages of five and six regarding living and non-living things in their environment. The study group consists of thirty children. “Cards” and “interview forms” are used as information tools to collect in-depth data on the phenomena examined in the study. The data collected within the scope of the study were analyzed by content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods. In addition, it was aimed to determine the thoughts of children about living and non-living concepts and to reveal the features they think of living and non-living objects. Concerning the concepts of living and non-living, according to which characteristics children distinguish these concepts as living and non-living, and the misconceptions formed in this regard are included in this study. According to the findings, vitality can be learned erroneously and incompletely in childhood. According to the findings obtained, the concept of “vitality” can be learned incorrectly and incompletely in early childhood. In addition, it has been determined that especially children grasp the vitality of animals that show significant mobility and development more easily, but they have difficulty in classifying them as living because they do not act on the vitality of plants and developmental differences are not observed. At the end of the research, suitable suggestions were made for researchers and educators.
Living-non-living being perception environmental and nature education early childhood education
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Subjects | Other Fields of Education |
Journal Section | Research Articles |
Authors | |
Publication Date | May 31, 2021 |
Submission Date | February 26, 2021 |
Published in Issue | Year 2021 Volume: 1 Issue: 1 |
Journal of Research in Elementary Education is an open access journal.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-4.0 International License.