Homeschooling: Science and Nature Study... Part 5

I intended to publish this article last week but a certain daughter broke her leg and... well, you get the idea. Better late than never as the old adage goes. Today I'm going to talk about science which is far and away my favorite of all subjects! I'll give you a trivial detail about myself that may come in handy sometime when we're playing 'Twenty Questions' together. When I was in high school, I was passionately in love with chemistry! It was not just a passing fad with me, it was a downright obsession. Hence, my four years of high school were spent as a chemistry student, a chemistry lab assistant and/or a chemistry tutor. Nothing gets my heart all a flutter like a periodic table and a little disproportionation! But, I digress.

My point is that my children are the recipients of a good deal of science education due to my own love of the subject. I have lots of ways I teach science because just one way isn't good enough... and it would be boring. We can't have boring science! Not in this family, anyway!

In keeping with my bent for Charlotte Mason, I love to teach science in the early years through nature study. I must admit, if I have a science weakness, it's nature study. I'm just not good at getting everyone outdoors to do this on a regular basis. Therefore, when I do make the effort, we do it on a big scale usually spending a whole day or even a whole week devoted to the study of nature. This occurs a lot during those first glorious weeks of spring when all I want to do is toss the school books over my shoulder and run barefoot through the meadow with the fragrant winds of spring wafting through my hair. Nothing incorporates 'spring fever' into something productive quite like nature study!

When out of the house on a nature study excursion we do things like finding varieties of leaves, identifying plants, identifying insects, holding fun filled scavenger hunts for lists of things I come up with in advance, going to the zoo, going to the Botanical Gardens, planting things, growing butterflies, watching seeds sprout in ziploc bags, identifying the snake we just stepped on and deciding whether or not its bite would have killed us... those sorts of things. I must admit at this point that we do little to no nature study during the winter. I am not about to step one toe outside of this house any longer than it takes to make a trip from the car to the door of the grocery store and back if I can help it. The way I see it, there's nothing but dead brown nature to behold in winter so we'll just wait until nature comes alive again in the spring.

Even my older students love nature study and it can be as in-depth and advanced as you'd like to make it. Generally, though, nature study is for the older girls what it is for me... the whole barefoot in the meadow thing. Nature study is the icing on the cake, so to speak, of our science education. I use a few spine books to guide our science studies. My absolute favorite series of science 'textbooks' is Apologia's Exploring Creation with...The Young Explorer's Series. These books include detailed science concepts with an emphasis on notebooking and narration. This is why I put the word 'textbook' in a quote mark. It is a textbook but it's not traditional in its teaching style or format. I simply love these books!! I use them from first grade on up.

Once we get to sixth grade, I switch to Apologia's high school science texts starting with General Science and working our way up. Having had a good deal of high school and college science, I can say with a fair amount of authority that these science books - especially the advanced series - contain material and work that would be considered challenging for undergraduate science in most any college. These books are terrific, comprehensive and again teach the concepts in the way that I like to teach. The experiments are very 'hands on' and include everything you would have in any traditional classroom. Believe me, there is nothing like dissecting a perch in your garage.

and keeping it for days.

and looking at it again and again.

Now that's what I call being passionate about your Biology 101!

Even though I have found these wonderful science textbooks, we still hold true to our 'living books' ideals and we read many wonderful science books included on Ambleside Online's book schedule for the younger years. We also read biographies about great scientists of the past. If you've picked up on a theme to my teaching, it is certainly that I find rich literature for each and every subject we study. You can never read too many books!

I could list mountains of resources and ideas for science projects and nature study ideas but instead I will give you few of my favorite sources of information. Cindy Rushton has a book, Nature Study The Easy Way, that you cannot afford to be without if you are at all interested in incorporating nature study into your school life! It is a wealth of ideas and information. A companion book to Nature Study The Easy Way is Mary Woodis' book, Nature Study Idea Book. Both of these are a 'must have'! I have had my copies for ten years and I still use them regularly. Also, Jeannie Fulbright has a website with free companion materials for each of the Young Explorer's Series books. We have used them and love them! Of course, Ambleside Online has one of the best lists of science literature I have found in their Year 1 through Year 6 science resources.

I encourage you when teaching science to your children to get your hands dirty and let them experience science. The best science lessons are not found in a book... though books are important and I love them. The best science learning takes place in the field up to your ankles in pond muck fishing out tadpoles and lake water samples! The best science lets your children watch the entire process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly for themselves, not just showing them pictures of it. And, the best science tool I have found is the notebook for recording their thoughts, observations, and facts. These are the 'hooks' of experience where they will 'hang' all of their new learning. It becomes a rich science 'textbook' of their own creation!

For more great articles and details on how to incorporate nature study into your homeschool, here are a list of great articles on the subject:

http://charlottemason.tripod.com/nature.html

http://simplycharlottemason.com/home/blog/2007/07/25/8-reasons-to-do-nature-study/

http://dominionfamily.com/blog/2005/08/nature-studies/

Happy Hypothesizing and Discovering!

You can read the first four parts of my homeschooling series here:

Homeschooling and Graduation... Part 1

Homeschooling: The Most Important Education... Part 2

Homeschooling: Language Arts... Part 3

Homeschooling: History... Part 4