A friend’s musings yesterday about how to teach "science" to her nine-year-old daughter got me thinking about elementary "science" education. I put science in quotes because it seems not to be the right word for what’s really best to learn before age nine or ten. Nature study seems better, as long as you understand that "nature" isn’t code for birds and trees and wildflowers, but instead is allowed to encompass the whole universe of physical objects and physical law.
Now is the time to make open-eyed observations, to name things, to gain a vocabulary of the world. This color is called blue. That sphere in the sky is the moon. The leaves were green, then they turned orange and fell off. This rock is called granite and that one is called sandstone. You can tell which of the downy woodpeckers is the male because he has a red patch that the female doesn’t have. This block is a cylinder and that ball is a sphere. This die is a cube, and that means it has six faces and all its edges are the same length. A baby comes out of her mommy’s body. When Mom forgot to put yeast in the pizza dough, it came out flat instead of puffy. When Dad built the campfire, he chose the dry wood instead of the green wood. We forgot to feed the fish and he died. You hit the window with the toy hammer and it cracked. We turned on the hose and it straightened itself out before water came out the other end. Mom braked suddenly to avoid an accident and I felt myself flung hard against my seat belt.
None of this stuff requires contrived experiments or demonstrations. It just happens, and we can talk about it when the time comes. If we want to know more about things, we can get books from the Q section of the library, buy field guides, maybe take a trip to the observatory.
When it’s time for learning to become more formal, we don’t have to buy a "science" textbook written for children in a particular grade. We do look for living books — and that doesn’t mean that a child’s story that has some animals in it is automatically "teaching science through literature" and therefore good, while every textbook must be automatically avoided. It does mean that we look for the book that was written by a passionate learner for a passionate learner.
This might be "literature:" a good example is The Burgess Bird Book for Children, which transmits a huge amount of information about habits and features of eastern U.S. birds in the course of an action-punctuated dialogue between the curious Peter Rabbit and the gossipy Jenny Wren. More likely it’ll be a book written for an enthusiast, like the National Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region. Or even a coffee-table book, like David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds.
I tend to think that contriving demonstrations and calling them "experiments" is a form of what Charlotte Mason called "twaddle. " (It’s another thing entirely if your child asks you to show him something, or finds a science fair project in a book and asks to build it.) And a lot of the classic "kids-science-stuff" is downright wrong — "volcanoes" powered by colored vinegar and baking soda? Don’t get me started. The best teacher at this hands-on age is real experience.
This is the age of using narrations — typically oral or written reports — to synthesize the information a child has taken in and explain what she’s learned. But we don’t want this to be mere regurgitation of facts from books. I think the best compromise is to choose the areas of study carefully so that the child can narrate real experiences of the world around her.
Take this egg-timer into the back yard and choose one plant. Look carefully at the plant for three whole minutes. Then come back in and tell me everything you can remember.
Go outside and draw a picture of the moon tonight. Do it again next Monday. Then write a letter to me telling how it has changed.
Fill this jar with dirt from the garden. Then pour it out into a pan, sift through it, and list all the different kinds of things you find there.
What did you think about the thunderstorm we had yesterday? Write down what it sounded like and what you saw.
These immediate experiences aren’t the only part of learning about the world — otherwise we would never learn about things on the other side of the planet or on the other end of the universe. We expand beyond the backyard using books, movies, museums, zoos. But the backyard contains enough material on which to practice narration skills, and to reinforce that the most important part of what we call "science" is accurate reporting of what we — ourselves — observe.
And it doesn’t have to be purely unschooled, driven by the child’s interests, although it can be if that’s your bag. I could plan to spend a quarter studying astronomy, another studying earth science, a third studying botany, and yet another studying human anatomy. Each of those unit studies could involve observations made in my house or back yard, narrations (or diagrams, or models, or sketches) that report those observations, and books read about the things I can’t observe from home.
Oscar’s interested in rocks right now. So I’ve put off my former plan (electric circuits) and am now planning to do a year of earth science. I’m going to buy a seventh-grade textbook for my own reference — to give me ideas of the topics to cover — and get a sample identification set (probably not a very large one, maybe a dozen different samples), some field guides, and a few tools. There is soil in our garden, rock on the trail, water in the ponds; weather falls from the sky every morning. These are the things to observe in detail. And when it’s time to learn more, the library is just up the street. I don’t have to make Oscar read the textbook unless he asks to see it.
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