Reflecting about science teaching in the early years of elementary school is imperative,
considering children formalize, at this school stage, and mediated by the teacher the contact
with scientific concepts. Still under the teacher’s responsibility, is the challenge of creating
a critical perspective concerning scientific culture among their students throughout the
process of knowledge construction, negotiating the meanings conceived by students when
actively involved in teaching situations within the scope of science. Many studies
demonstrate the school and science education are still moving in the opposite direction,
ignoring the characteristics of scientific work and the child's investigative and creative
potential, thus, perpetuating an archaic and experimental teaching that does not recognize the
dialectic process involved in the construction of knowledge. In this context, committed to the
desire to produce science together with the group of first-year elementary school students
and bringing in my professional trajectory traits that distance me from an impoverished and
linear view of knowledge, added to an enormous curiosity for the natural world, I come to
the research problem: In what terms, as a teacher of the initial years, along with a group of
students attending the 1st year, express our scientific knowledge while carrying out research
activities on garden animals and reflecting on the senses and meanings ? Faced with this
question, the following research purpose has been established and directs my focus: to
investigate my own teaching practice in the first year of Elementary School, by means of
classroom research, as a possibility to produce scientific knowledge along with my students,
fostering scientific literacy and allowing the development of an educational product capable
of helping other teachers as a reference material. I resorted to the theoretical-methodological
approach of narrative research to put together the narrative fragments emerged since my
teaching development period until the phase of support to the construction of meanings and
senses by students when involved in learning situations, turning field texts into research texts.
The data, unique and singular, were built in classroom research development context, when
studying garden animals with a class of 15 students. To record the data, a narrative diary,
audio recordings, activities, drawings and photos extracted from the classroom practice were
used, selecting the most significant class episodes with regard to the interpretation of
meanings. As a result of the process, I highlight the construction of scientific knowledge
transposed into school knowledge, through a network of meanings that give sense to the
reality studied, I observed the expansion of spontaneous concepts, the development of an
investigative posture, the acquisition of a scientific vocabulary and enjoyment of group
activities. Within this context, immersed in the pleasure of teaching and producing science,
I discuss the challenges of this school discipline in school ambience, the child empowerment
as a subject of their own learning, capable of producing science, supported by the theories of
Piaget and Vygotsky. I also dialog with other authors who highlight the importance of
scientific literacy and discard the belief that children do not have the necessary maturity and
abstraction to produce knowledge. In these terms, I advocate the importance of
contextualized teaching, based on an active methodology and exploration of the environment,
not with the objective of offering answers but above all, with the purpose of generating
curiosity, stimulating questioning and interest in science through classroom research.
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