Using Imagination to Bridge Young Children’s Literacy and Science Learning: A Dialogic Approach

Integrating children’s literacy and science learning has become a new focus in literacy instruction. Imagination, an integral part of children’s learning experience, remains marginalized in today’s early childhood education curriculum. Drawing on a yearlong ethnographic study in a first-grade classroom, this paper explores the potential affordance of imagination in integrating young children’s literacy and science learning. The findings showed that the integration opportunities were organically constructed in and through children’s natural engagement of imagination in their reading process. A dialogic approach is presented as one way to ignite children’s imaginations in their literacy and science learning.