Young children are naturally curious, and it’s our job as educators to encourage exploration and curiosity. Kids learn about the world and their role in it as they investigate, discover, and have conversations with others.
PBS LearningMedia’s All About Me collection is designed to build kids’ curiosity while encouraging their concept of self, finding similarities and differences in various ways — and celebrating them.
Find Engaging Content to Spark Young Minds
Explore the 20 different All About Me lesson plans to find opportunities to investigate engaging questions like, “Why do we sweat? Why do we have fingerprints? What facial features do we have?” Introduce short media clips from PBS KIDS’ favorites like Sid the Science Kid and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood to spark their interest and promote conversations about topics like movement, emotions, and their skin.
Implementing the Lesson: Why Do We Sweat?
I was one of 18 educators selected to work with PBS KIDS to review media-rich lesson plans. Two of the lesson plans that I reviewed and implemented in my class were, "Why Do We Sweat?: Part 1" and "Why Do We Sweat?: Part 2." Here are some teaching tips on using these engaging lessons.
The well-organized and easy-to-follow lessons provided a clear objective along with guiding questions to introduce the activity, support the learning, and check for understanding. The lesson plans included extended learning activities and suggested books to complement the topic, as well as PBS KIDS for Parents resources to build a school-to-home connection.
My favorite part of the "Why Do We Sweat?: Part 1"lesson plan was the media clip and Sid the Weatherman, from Sid the Science Kid! It helped spark my students’ interest in temperature in a fun and engaging way. In the clip, Teacher Susie, Sid’s preschool teacher, explained how the temperature marker on the thermometer moves up and down depending on the temperature. At the end of the clip, Sid exclaimed, “Hey! You’re a scientist, you can try this, too!” I asked my students if they wanted to try an experiment and they were excited to try it themselves.
Here is step-by-step guidance to conduct the experiment.
The Experiment
1. I filled one metal bowl with hot oatmeal and a second bowl with ice.
2. My students touched the bowl filled with ice cubes and then they touched the second bowl filled with warm oatmeal.
3. Students inserted a thermometer (reading room temperature) in each bowl and observed what changes happened to the thermometers.
The Outcome
Just like in the media clip, the cold of the ice made the temperature of the thermometer fall and the heat from the oatmeal in the second bowl made the temperature rise. The students were very excited about this discovery and continued to watch the thermometers closely.
Follow Up
After exploring, the students drew pictures in their science journals of their observations. As a group, we were surprised and excited to see that everyone was able to draw about what they discovered. The lesson was engaging and shared all the tools needed to introduce ways to identify differences in hot and cold temperatures. We connected our findings to further investigate body temperature — which we exploredinthe "Why Do We Sweat?: Part 2" lesson.
Explore the Collection
The All About Me Collection features PBS KIDS favorites including media clips, printables, games, extension activities, and crafts for the classroom while advancing the ever-important school-to-home connection through science, math, art, and dance activities.
Helping Students Gain Confidence
As an educator, you can encourage your students to have powerful conversations as they identify and describe how they are similar to and different from one other. As students realize how they are unique and what makes them special, they gain self-confidence and their positive self-esteem grows. Students also become more empathetic as they learn to respect and celebrate their differences.
Home-to-School Connection
Building home-to-school connections with the families of the students in my class is very important to me. With the PBS KIDS for Parents resources included in the lesson plan, I was able to share a family letter, extension activities, and the science journal drawings with the families. One family integrated the PBS KIDS resource, "Make a Bottle Thermometer," at home and it was exciting to see that the learning continued at home.
