Learning science through talking science in elementary classroom

Elementary students in grade two make sense of science ideas and knowledge through their contextual experiences. Mattis Lundin and Britt Jakobson find in their research that early grade students have sophisticated understandings of human anatomy and physiology. In order to understand what students' know about human body and various systems, both drawings and spoken responses provide rich evidence of their understanding of the connections between science drawings and verbal explanations. In this forum contribution, we present several theoretical connections between everyday language and science communication and argue that building communication skills in science are essential. We also discuss how young participants should be valued and supported in research. Finally we discuss the need for multimodal research methods when the research participants are young.