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The Southington School System has adopted The Full Option Science System (FOSS) into our science curriculum district wide. FOSS provides students in grades K-6 the opportunity to learn real science through careful planning and coordinating.
FOSS springs from a philosophy of learning that has guided the development of successful active-learning science curricula for more than 25 years. The developers are dedicated to the proposition that elementary students learn science best by doing science. We as teachers, do science together with our students, engaging them in enduring experiences that lead to deeper understanding of the natural world.
Science is an active enterprise, made active by our human capacity to think. Scientific knowledge advances when scientists observe objects and events, think about how they relate to what is known, test their ideas in logical ways, and generate explanations that integrate the new information into the established order. Thus the scientific enterprise is both what we know (content) and how we come to know it (process).
Because science is a discovery activity, it is fundamentally a process for producing new knowledge. Although many of us tend to think of scientists as special people, the processes they use are quite natural to all people. We all continually make careful observations of phenomena and create explanations that make sense out of those observations. Science is a wonderful, natural human enterprise through which we all find out about things.
The best way for students to appreciate the scientific enterprise, learn important scientific concepts, and develop the ability to think well is to actively construct ideas through their own inquiries, investigations, and analyses. FOSS was created to engage students in these processes as they explore the natural world.
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