Using multimodal strategies to challenge early years children’s essentialist beliefs

In conversation with a practitioner, the child to take the demise of the majority of the story’s explained that each plant would have two leaves seeds in their stride and described some of their and a flower. [...] The child’s They employed their mathematics vocabulary to curling up and unravelling of his body modelled the describe the heights of sunflower plants and used germination of the seed, while tracing the shape of ordinal relations to sequence seedlings from the heights of the plants with a finger through the shortest to tallest. [...] the use of additional notations in children’s drawings, but it did succeed in showing the observations of the differences within collections differences in the number of seedlings at different of plants of the same species. [...] In doing so, children were introduced to the overall shape of the distribution of height of all In order to encourage an overview of the number of the plants being grown by the class. [...] Drawing around the assemblage of plants Children were encouraged to share their data helped to make the shape of the distribution of with one another and to make comparisons number of leaves more visible and evident to across the collection of growing bean seeds.