This study elucidates instructional strategies for introducing inquiry-based science to lower-elementary students (Grades 1–4) in a Japanese microschool. Addressing the conflict between young learners' intuitive theories and scientific explanations, it investigates how teachers design “entry points” bridging daily life with scientific concepts.
Adopting a Constructivist Grounded Theory Approach (Charmaz, 2006), I analyzed teacher discourse from a two-year longitudinal Lesson Study (13 meetings, 2023–2025) involving eight teachers, using the scaffolding means of questioning and instructing (van de Pol et al., 2010) as sensitizing concepts.
The analysis identified a three-component framework: Entry Points activate prior knowledge and daily-life experiences; Continuous Scaffolding nurtures prediction and causal reasoning; and Broadening Inquiry validates Modeling, Problem Solving and Concept Clarification alongside Comparative Experimentation. From this analysis, the study generates Gen-taiken (現体験, living experience) – learners' intensified, purposefully guided engagement with experience as it unfolds in the present – as the experiential foundation for conceptual change.
Because the theory was generated within a single microschool with small, mixed-age classes and from teachers' reflective discourse rather than measured student learning, I offer Gen-taiken and the framework as transferable concepts to be tested, not generalizations.
The study proposes Gen-taiken as a new theoretical concept, distinguished from the established Japanese notion of proto-experience (gen-taiken) and argues that Broadening Inquiry is not a dilution of science but the deliberate design of living experience that lays, here and now, the experiential foundation for rigorous scientific thinking.
