In recent years there has been increased emphasis in the Caribbean on the teaching of science at the Pre-primary and Primary levels. Most teachers have been expressing doubts about their ability to teach science at these levels. The series Early Years: Science Step by Step for the Caribbean, 1 and 2 should be quite helpful to these teachers.
The books have been quite successful in capturing the essence of early childhood science education. The modern approach to science at the early stages focuses on the development of skills in the processes of science. These processes include observing with all the senses, communicating, recognizing and using numbers and number relations, recognizing and using time and space relations, measuring, inferring and predicting.
Competence in these processes will not only help children in science activities but is a prerequisite for learning other subjects such as mathematics, social studies and language arts. Early Years 1 has explored some of these basic skills that are vital to foster intellectual development in children, viz. observing, classifying, using number relations and problem solving. The more advanced Early Years 2, further emphasizes these skills and introduces others such as space/time relationships, measuring and serial ordering.