Children’s Thinking. Clouds, Rain, and Rainbow in Children’s Explanations

The article describes the learning process of children, and the associated difficulties in the transfer from everyday thinking to scientific. Everyday explanations (direct descriptions of phenomena, fragments heard from adults, analogy-based explanations) are prevalent in preschool children. In school, children begin to learn scientific (non-experiential) knowledge and develop the scientific level of thinking. This is a long and time-consuming process, in the course of which children continue to use everyday explanations, adding to them synthetic concepts and explanations. The relevant theory is illustrated by analysing the explanations of children with regard to clouds and rain as conventional meteorological phenomena, and the rainbow as an extraordinary and attractive object which deserves attention. Individual interviews were conducted with 116 primary school students. The results show that everyday and synthetic explanations are predominant in primary school children, with the relevant reasons being pointed out.