For our third installment in the series on "What We Do" in our homeschool, today we are going to be discussing the subject of science. Easy in the elementary years, more challenging as your students get older, science can be extremely fun despite being incredibly involved. Read on to see why. If you haven't seen our other post in the series or would like to catch up
My Approach to Science
What we do for science has changed as the children age. When Britt was little I started out only doing science by following his interest. I highly recommend using this method with early elementary school students. It gives them control over some aspect of their schooling, and it is easy to find library books and web resources to explore their questions and obsessions. After all science at its heart is the subject of discovering the world around you.
Much of science can be observed. Kids can learn all about biology and the animal kingdoms through observation. Nature study can introduce them into the habit of journaling that later can be built upon as they begin writing lab reports. Chemistry can be explored with a host of household items, and pine car derby projects can be used to present the basics of physics. The key to learning science is really plenty of opportunities to interact with the world around you, and we call that experimentation.
My twin two-year-olds do science every day. Oh they aren't writing any lab reports or giving voice to well reasoned hypothesis yet, but they are trying out different actions to gauge the response. They will repeat these things multiple times to determine if the experiment always yields the same response. Most children have a natural curiosity to explore and make sense of their world, and homeschoolers are in a prime environment to nurture that curiosity.
However, it isn't necessarily easy to build science into your homeschool, it takes some real forethought, planning, and active implementation. While books will take you a long way, there is no good substitute for actually handling and working with scientific materials. Before we used box curriculum, that meant using Janice VanCleave's books and hunting all over town for the supplies needed to do various experiments. Doing experiments at home, meant waring with my OCD to let the kids make messes and totally upend the house for projects that stretched out for days or even weeks at a time. It meant that I had to actively be involved, and that is still tough for me. I like the house neat and orderly. I hate having projects drug out and needing to keep glass jars, cardboard boxes, and a bunch of miscellaneous clutter around the house. But homeschooling often takes us out of our comfort zone. I can recall very few hands on projects and labs in elementary school. I did do a yearly science fair project for several years and I can recall an especially fun project building and wiring a little cardboard house in fourth grade, but experimentation just wasn't a daily part of our science as kids. Even in high school labs were held only around once a month. In my college prep honors biology class dissecting a frog was a optional bonus lab, and it was our only dissection of the entire year. So rather than following that model, take advantage of the flexibility of time and embrace the messiness that is labs in your homeschool.
What I Use to Teach Science
In the early years of homeschooling, I would ask Britt what he was interested in and curious about. Dinosaurs was his first response, and so we checked out every book that the library could get us on dinosaurs, and rarely children's books. We checked out materials for teens and adults that described classes of dinosaurs and broke each grouping down into individuals. We read about their diets and their family structure. We looked at where on the globe they had been found and talked about how different the world was when they lived. Much of the information was above his understanding, so I would read it and then paraphrase what we had read. In that way he learned far more than was typical for his age. We read on those books every day for about 4 months. Then he wanted to make a book of dinosaurs. So I searched out coloring pages for as many of the dinosaurs as I could find, and he would dictate to me. I would type their names and the meaning of their names, what they ate and their size, and any other interesting details he could remember. Sometimes we would consult our books to verify things like the size, but he remembered a surprising amount of material on his own. After typing it all into a word document I'd add the coloring image, print it up, and he'd color the picture. We learned lots of subjects that way, occasionally adding in free printable resources with different unit studies.
Not only did he learn the subjects he studied, but he thrived. That first year another subject he studied and made a little booklet for was Astronomy. We checked out books on every planet, we learned about the planet that might have once existed where the asteroid belt is today. We read about ice planets in the Keppler Belt and how Pluto and Charon could be considered a dual planet. Again we took home books with meat, not just basic children's readers. At the homeschool convention at the end of that school year a vender was selling a computer program to teach Astronomy and had it set up to a placement quiz for students. For fun I read him the questions because he wasn't reading independently yet, and he tested at a fourth grade level. I was shocked, but it proved to me how powerful interest lead learning is when coupled with great resources.
As the kids have gotten a little older or wanted to explore more details of subjects that I couldn't find free resources for I've branched out into Apologia textbooks. Back in the day, Britt wanted to learn about rocks, but for the life of me every different kind looked nearly the same while we were trying to study and identify them in the wild, so when Kate made the same request this year, we got Apologia's elementary level textbook on Earth Science. Their notebooking system is a more in depth version of the home made books I spent so much time making with Britt in those early years, and they include plenty of experiments. Best of all I don't have to spend near as much time hunting for supplies, because nearly everything can be bought together in one kit from Home Science Tools and shipped directly to the house. Britt and Ruth have begun using their materials for high school as well.
Scientific Outlook
I have two primary concerns when evaluating curriculum for science. The first is that it be written in a way that stokes the kids interests rather than tanks their natural curiosity and therefore it must also include plenty of experiments. Apologia does this really well in the lower grades. The style of writing is conversational (a personal favorite as you might have guessed from my own writing style), and there are lots of questions peppered through the text to engage the student. I am able to read the text to the kids while they fill in their notebooking pages, and only occasionally have to find additional resources these days for science. Unfortunately it isn't quite as well done for the high school level text, though the video lessons that accompany the book strive to spark interest while relaying incredibly detailed information. Apologia also does a really good job of providing plenty of interesting experiments. The kids have built smoke bombs for chemistry, grown gardens for botany, and built models for astronomy. Why, just a few weeks ago Britt and Ruth explored osmosis by cycling an egg through vinegar, corn syrup, and water in 24 hour increments. They were enthralled to watch the membrane work.
My second concern was to find accurate, primarily secular in nature that will also evaluate creationist view points. This is the trickiest part of finding science curriculum for me. I perhaps have a unique outlook for Christians regarding science. By all the best scientific evidence out there, the earth is billions of years old, while my faith tells me it is only 6,000 years old and was all created in a literal 6 days. However, I take this as a matter of faith, and because God exists outside of creation, I recognize that we cannot prove him scientifically. At the same time, I can see evidence in the world around me of complex design which means that there must be a Designer. While this may prove a stumbling block to some, I can easily reconcile these two positions with a rather engenius example that my father used when I was small.
When we see a Grandfather clock running we can assume it began at the beginning of the week, and will run until the chains completely move at the end of the week. What we cannot know is that the builder built the clock and set up the chain on Tuesday afternoon 10 minutes before we walked into the room. And we have no way of knowing that he plans to stop the chains and disassemble the clock 10 minutes after we leave. This is why the earth can appear to be much older than it is in reality. My father also taught me just as Adam and Eve were created full grown, so was this earth that they lived on. Don't you imagine that the trees in the garden would have had tree rings, despite not having lived for years prior? The best evidence shows us that the earth is billions of years old because it was created full grown. However, honest science can also evaluate things like the Grand Canyon and postulate that it could be the result of a massive flood event as other canyons have formed rapidly in the modern era on much smaller scales.
Scientifically evaluating and presenting both views is something I feel is really important to the kids education. They both need to recognize what science can teach us and be able to work with the evidence and material. However, they also need to recognize the limitations of science and conjecture. And somewhere along the line they need to have the critical thinking skills to determine for themselves where the truth lies, and be able to defend their scientific positions with facts and evidence.
While I'm not wholly satisfied with Apologia in this respect, I feel like it does a great job of covering creationist points, and I can reinforce corresponding secular points with other materials, since they are so prevalent. Meanwhile, I teach my children that while science can tell them so very much about the world, faith cannot be established scientifically. The scientific method is all about what we can observe through our senses and how to make sense of the material world. It can tell us what and why and how things work, but it cannot answer deeper philosophical questions because those things are supernatural, the very word meaning they exist outside nature. So we should appreciate science for what it can teach us, and leave the rest to faith.
Reinforce Learning
As a child, I loved science and held a wonder of the world around me. I want to recreate that for my children, so despite the chaos and serious time requirements, I will pull out everything we own to do a science experiment in the kitchen, read copious amounts of books, and find quality textbooks to organize our learning path. However, there is more that can be done to reinforce learning, and, of course, I mean field trips.
Museums surround students with the artifacts of the concepts and materials that you are studying. Way back when we studied Dinosaurs it was one thing to note how tall they stood, and it was another thing entirely to stand in the foyer of the Museum of Natural History in New York City and crane your neck up to look at the towering fossil of a dinosaur. We have taken advantage of Museums of science that allow students to experiment pulling a heavy weight up by a rope, and then pulling the same weight up using pulleys. Visiting aquariums lets them see first hand various underwater creatures, while zoos allow them to observe the mannerisms of other animals. Hikes through the woods allow them to observe geology and botany for themselves.
In science seeing really is believing. And coupling good field trips with plenteous experiments will give your children a firm foundation in science. They may not always remember the difference between meiosis and mitosis. There will be some concepts that just don't sink in from their reading and study, but the things that they can see and touch will stick with them. Years later, they recall not only what they saw, but conversations they heard, and how they relate to the science we've studied at home. These types of learning opportunities are key to helping your children better understand the importance of the subjects you are studying in your homeschool.
In Conclusion
Science has the potential to be a highly engrossing and vibrant subject. We allow around a half hour to an hour for science on the typical day. Experiment days take longer. For the younger two students in our house I read our the text and they fill out the notebooking pages with me while we discuss in layman's terms what they've learned. Even Kate at 6 gets a surprising amount out of these conversations. With the older two kids, they watch their video lessons, then read the text and make notes before answering the couple of questions at the end of the section. If they have questions they are encouraged to come and see me. As happens more and more frequently, if I don't know the answer to their questions, I'm happy to reread with them, or look for more videos or information on the computer.
I hope today's post exploring what we do for science has encouraged you to make good books, experiments, and field trips a part of your science lessons. Perhaps it's even rekindled that curiosity and love of learning that we sometimes lose as we age. Afterall, nothing is quite as persuasive and inspiring as a teacher who is passionate about their subject.
Beginning next week we are going to spend the remainder of Tuesdays this year looking at language arts, since they encompass so much of what we spend our time on. Remember to check out next week's post in the series What We Do: Phonics.
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