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A Science Celebration is an event that utilizes significant parent involvement to provide a joint learning experience for preschool children and their families. Open-ended science activities are set up at various stations. Parents typically sign up to facilitate one of the activities for a period of time. They walk children through the activity using a provided instruction sheet. Children rotate from activity to activity as directed by the teacher until they have had an opportunity to explore each one.
A preschool Science Celebration is not like a science fair for older students in which the students create projects at home and then display them at school. Rather, it is a cooperative learning experience for children and their families that is designed to offer parents an opportunity to be involved with their children in a celebration of learning.
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I've had several Science Celebrations for my combined class of three and four year olds, and I've always been pleasantly surprised with the number of adults who wanted to help.
We had our Celebration at the end of the school year as a culminating event to show all the new things we had learned in the past school year. We were usually lucky enough with weather to use our outdoor playground as well as our two indoor classrooms to set up science stations.
I liked to use the playground for the messy or smelly activities. We made Popping Bags outdoors (see below), viewed live worms with magnifying glasses, and made oobleck and slime on outside picnic tables. These were fun and exciting activities for young children and many times the dads, uncles, grandpas, etc, helped out at these activities.
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Our Science Celebration was an event where we invited parents, siblings, grandparents, and other family members or significant adults in our student's lives to share in the child's learning. We started our celebration at 5:00 (since that coincided with the time that parents came to pick up their children from after-school care), and then had pizza and refreshments afterward for everyone to enjoy. Our Science Celebration has always been a huge success!
-- Teacher from a Catholic preschool
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Here are a few sample activities we have used as part of a Science Celebration:
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