The study explores children's emerging understanding of an important science concept in chemistry. Play-based learning activities were designed for children to experience and imagine the concept of 'small' as used in chemistry, moving from the visually experienced level of 'small' towards more imaginative understandings. Data were collected through visual ethnography. Analyses of six vignettes of conversations between children and the teacher illustrate development of children's understanding of the focus concept. Deconstruction of everyday items familiar to the children and visual computer animations provided experiences that enabled children to transition from a macro-level of understanding to visualise the molecular/ atomic level to differentiate between macro-and micro-understandings of 'small'. A process of 'sustained shared thinking' could describe the teaching/learning processes evident in the children's and teacher's conversations. The analyses suggest that sustained and shared conversations between children and teachers should stem from children's everyday experiences.

This study focuses on the design of play-based learning activities for chemistry in preschool. Viewing chemistry as a part of our past and present culture instead of as a subject, provides the backdrop for a more holistic approach to chemistry within this specific environment. A cultural-historical perspective, together with scaffolding, emergent science skills and sustained shared thinking, made up the framework for the design of the learning activities. Results show that when scaffolding and emergent science skills are used within the design, they provide good support for both the content and the teacher in the actual learning situation. Working with scaffolding was also beneficial for professional development. However, for a progressive and inclusive activity design, it is essential to take into account aspects of the immediate environment and methods for direct evaluation.

This study focuses on the development of executive functions in preschool children during a series of science activities. A longitudinal play-based learning intervention was designed and implemented following the design of an educational experiment. Data were collected through visual ethnography in hot situations with adult supervision. Results show how entwined the concepts of inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility are within young children’s development. The development of cognitive flexibility or attention shifting readily occurred when there were fictive characters (such as the king and his royal family), but changing perspective toward a nonfictive environment (i.e., taking other children’s perspectives) was a more difficult and time-consuming process. This process began in an individual perspective and expanded to acknowledging others’ perspectives, then moved toward creating common perspectives or alternative narratives. Results show that science activities can be a bridge for preschool children to transfer their use of executive functions, from fairytales and games toward everyday tasks.

This study has been performed in Sweden, where the preschool curriculum states that children’s understanding of simple chemical processes is a goal to strive towards [13]. However, uncertainty within the current preschool practice exists and has been described by B. Sundberg et al. [20]. Motivated by the lack of scientific literature on what chemistry content is suitable for preschool children and how to introduce it, this study aims to tackle how abstract concepts like “atoms” and “molecules” can be introduced to preschool children. With this purpose, a play-based learning intervention was designed, following the cultural-historical model for preschool science education proposed by M. Fleer [7], and implemented in two Swedish preschools, dividing a total of 20 three-years-old children into four groups of five children each. Data were collected in the form of video-recordings of the sessions and analysed following the principles from the experimental-genetic method summarized by N. Veresov [23]. Results are presented in the form of vignettes that illustrate significant moments from the intervention, together with discussion of how the social situation of development, the zone of actual development and the mediating tools facilitate the children in starting to talk about atoms.