Back from scicon 2016 and it was a blast! I got to see a pile of teachers proudly showing their science work in classes with us (all with capabilities or Nature of Science evident) as well as listening to scientists talking about their inquiry projects and got to visit GNS as well as look at the geological features of Wellington!
One thing that really came out of this was "vocabulary". It started when I was having dinner and the big screen was showing arm wrestling. Not only was I unaware of this but was surprised by all the terminology. The history of each player would pop up on the screen and I had no idea what most of it meant. Later, on the tour around Wellington's geological highlights, there was a similar moment with a geologist, Hamish Carter talking about the Wellington faultline. Again, there were a few words that I could sort of work out what he meant but also a lot of more technical words that went beyond me. In a recent workshop,  someone said that the scallop's ridges probably have a scientific name. It caused me to 'squirrel' later that day and read up a bit -as usual I ended up knowing more than I really wanted... did you know scallops have lots of eyes? And that the amount of ridges can tell someone how old the scallop is (a bit like tree rings)?

(image from: http://naturalhistory.museumwales.ac.uk/) 

All this has reminded me about the need for vocabulary... If our children are studying shells, we can stick to children learning the common names like scallop or turret shell or they could go a bit deeper and find the specific scallop... but could they go a little deeper and find out its latin name? Could they find out what some of the parts of the shell are called? Why do we have particular names for all these bits? What do the children think?
If I have my NZ Curriculum hat on, this would be part of the Nature of Science's strand "Communicating in Science". It doesn't fit quite so nicely into one capability but to my mind, if we're doing science observations, then we would like children to use correct terminology (at their level).
I think it would be valuable for children to understand this idea around science -that scientists use vocabulary to describe their work, and perhaps learn a little too!