Rough Draft Science Curriculum: pre-k - 3rd/4th grade

This is actually more a list of rescources than a day-to-day curriculum.  I think that what is covered in a day or week or trimester will vary greatly, so I'll leave it open for now.

Also, I think I have an advantage because I LOVE math and science so much.  Many people are daunted by these subjects.  I, on the other hand, cannot WAIT to get into these materials and teach (and relearn) such fascinating stuff, from a new perspective (natural history).


Nature Study:

The Handbook of Nature Study
One Small Square series
Let's Read and Find Out series
Burgess Bird Book for Children
Various field guides for our region
Learning to identify plants (emphasized) and animals
Keeping a nature journal, as per Charlotte Mason's methods
Vocabulary of plant and animal parts, plant and animal life-cycles

Science:

Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding
Simple machines experiments, and any others that come up and are appropriate
Science in Ancient Greece
Archimedes and the Door of Science
 The Librarian who measured the Earth
Science in Ancient Rome
Galen and the Gateway to Medecine
Blood and Guts (maybe, I'm not thrilled with this one, but will use it as a place holder until I find a human body book or medical history book for kids that I like better)
The Body Book
Something on nutrition
Inventing the Future

I expect this general curriculum outline to be sufficient material for pre-k through 3rd-4th grade or so.

There is a lot of flexibility here.  Many of these books are to be read like stories.  Some of them have very involved projects and experiments.  Some are actual science "lessons" to be taught in a more traditional format.  Hopefully this will appeal to many learning styles and intelligences, until we figure out how Eliot and Ivy learn best.

Things that will NOT be in our curriculum:
Random and disconnected science experiments.  (Unless, of course, we are on our third straight week of rain or snow.)

Science Heirarchy, Charlotte Mason and Classical Education

I keep coming back to the two methods mentioned above as my leading favorites in the homeschool style debate.  However, I don't think either one places adequate emphasis on math or science.  I should say, my two favorite CM websites, Ambleside Online and Mater Amabilis don't address math at all (up to the parents to find the curriculum) and science is, in my opinion, put in the backseat- 2-3 short lessons per week, in addition to nature study.  And I don't even want to get into religious biology texts... 



But, they do appear to approach science in a hierarchical manner, because they approach science as a history subject, and a lot of the science teachings correspond with the history books being read about Ancient Greece and Rome.  Not a bad system. 

As I already talked about, natural history seems to be an excellent start to a science education.  Here is the definition of Natural History, from wikipedia:

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals.^[1] Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms. That is a very broad designation in a world filled with many narrowly focused disciplines. So while modern natural history dates historically from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and the medieval Arabic world through to the scattered European Renaissance scientists working in near isolation, today's field is more of a cross discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences.

This seems to fit perfectly with the Charlotte Mason and Classical Education approach to science.  In terms of experiments, the child is doing mostly observational studies out in nature (nature study), which includes keeping a journal (for older kids) or a classification binder (my personal addition for the pre-writing crowd), and making collections (leaves, flowers, edible things from a garden, bugs...).  Starting in kindergarten or first grade, the child can add in science (not replacing nature study) as a formal subject.  After combing through the two websites mentioned above, and doing some research in the homeschooling forums, I feel ready to put together a very rough draft for the next few years.  See my next post. 

Best Biology Project Ever

Back to the Vivarium.  Now, I consider myself to be a bit of a science buff, so my brain freeze on amphibians and mammals was a bit embarrassing.  Nothing google couldn’t straighten me out on though.  And in the mean time, I developed my Best Biology Project Ever (BBPE).

The BBPE is a simple system for organizing animals we come across, whether outside or in Eliot’s My Big Backyard magazine, into their appropriate phylum, class, and eventually, order.  For now, we’ve kept it simple.  I bought a binder, then recycled some old dividers, labeling one Vertebrates (Chordata phylum) and the other Invertebrates (all those other annoying phylum).  Under the vertebrate tab went 5 large manila envelopes for the five classes of vertebrates- fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals.  Under invertebrates, I have only made insects and arachnids, both part of the arthropod phylum.  We’ll expand out the invertebrates as we move along in the project.  In addition, certain classes, like insects, will end up with smaller envelopes labeled with the most popular orders.

It took us about 45 minutes to put this together.  Eliot used scissors and glue to organize our pictures onto construction paper (color coded), I labeled the envelopes, and we then classified all of our vertebrates.  When we got to a hard animal, like a dolphin, we talked about why it went with the mammals, and not the fish.  

Next month, we’ll get another magazine in the mail.  We’ll read it for a week, then cut it up and classify the animals, creating new envelopes for any new invertebrates who might wander across our path. 

In six months, we might take out all the animals in a folder, say, mammals, and compare and contrast them.  With a little guidance, Eliot might notice that they all have hair or fur, that they have live births, and that they nurse their young.  As he begins to determine for himself the official characteristics that distinguish mammals, we’ll mark them down on the mammals envelope.  And then another week,we might attack the reptiles, or fish. 

In a few years, as our collection expands, I think he will have the following concepts:

• Classification by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family,  genus, and species (basic taxonomy)
• Memorization of the 5 classes of vertebrates and several classes of invertebrates
• Memorization of several orders of insects, and the ability to classify a specimen into one of those orders
• Implicit understanding of a nested hierarchy system (dividers, large envelopes, smaller envelopes, stapled “families”, last names (genus) and first names (species))
• Expertise in cutting and gluing
• Sight read many of the names and categories
• A base of latin word roots

And that is a very, very strong base for understanding middle-level concepts (inference and prediction), like ecological niche, biodiversity, adaptation, food chains and webs.  And he will also have an excellent knowledge base for the advanced and abstract concepts of conservation, ecology, interdependence, natural selection, evolution, and genetics.  

Does taxonomy matter?  Well, I was taught taxonomy in AP biology, and university level biology.  What is silly is that it is (rather, was, until geneticists got involved) a low level field of biology.  It is a lot of memorization and classification, something a 5 year old, or even 3 year old, is more capable of doing than a 20 year old.  (No, really, a 5 year old has the best memory he will ever have in his life.  Don’t believe me?  Challenge a five year old to a game of Memory!)  But the information is absolutely necessary to build the rest of biology upon.  So why teach 5 year olds about the sad pandas that are going extinct, a concept so abstract as to be almost meaningless to a child (and therefore more akin to indoctrination than education) when he is much more capable and interested (Eliot LOVES his binder) of doing taxonomy- the basic building block of all biology?

Someday when Eliot is in an advanced biology class, and this information is covered, it will not be some boring flow chart to be memorized.  It will be a specific folder, under a specific tab, in his green binder, on the left side of the second shelf of his bookshelf.  It will be concrete.

And here are a few final thoughts on the BBPE:

• It is a fun craft project involving glue (I have not worked out a way to incorporate glitter yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something)
• In the summer, a child could photograph local fauna (or flora, for a plant binder), and in the winter, magazines can be cut up for images
• It takes 45 minutes to put the basics together, and probably cost us less than $5.
• It will now take about 15 minutes a month to add images, and another 30 minutes or so, spread out, to talk about this or that, or to pull out the binder to illustrate a question that might come up. 
• It is expandable- this project can be built upon for the next 12 years or his education. 
• It can be modified, to make it more challenging (field guides to give scientific names to the animals, studying those pesky invertebrate classes in more depth, etc.)
• It can be used to illustrate middle-level concepts- pull out a handful of images form each envelope, and create a food web or biome, compare the characteristics of reptiles and birds and try to determine why genetics tells us they are closely related in evolutionary terms, etc. 
• It takes up almost no space- it just goes on the bookshelf when not in use. 
• It takes so little time that homeschoolers or out-of-home schoolers can work on it with their parents. 
• Taxonomy is, at the basic level, very easy to do.  Parents with no biology background can easily master the characteristics of the 5 vertebrate classes and a few invertebrate classes, and go from there, learning with their child.  By pausing to look up an animal in a field guide or on the internet (as I did with seahorses), your child sees how knowledge can be gathered from various resources.

For all I know, everybody and their brother has a taxonomy binder.  But I’ve never heard of one.  If you’ve already seen something like this, feel free to send me a link.  I’d love to refine our system if improvements exist.  

The beginning of several inter-related posts on science

As I said in a previous post, I’ve been doing a bit of research on the hierarchy of science.  I’ll use the word hierarchy in two ways- first, the skills of scientific study, and second, the topics to be studied.  Here is a summary chart of scientific skills, which is organized in a hierarchical manner.

Now I’m faced with a harder task- organizing science, yes, the entire body of human discovery as we know it, into something that works like building blocks- basic concepts first, more advanced concepts later.  Ideally, I see a science curriculum that works like a math curriculum, with a stair-step approach.
  

Last weekend, we took Eliot to the vivarium.  This was a last-minute decision- it was raining, we were bored…  The vivarium was a small reptile and amphibian house, not any larger than our apartment.  We had a fantastic time.  

For the whole car ride home, I was berating myself because I could not remember how to classify reptiles and amphibians.  Was a turtle a reptile or an amphibian?  Argh!!!  Ultimately, this little inner monologue developed into, what I’m going to call, my Best Biology Project Ever, and talk about in another post.

But now, back to hierarchy.  An example of working out of order would be to discuss the genetic bottleneck situation of Cheetahs before discussing biodiversity, genetic diversity, conservation, population, isolation…  I mean, I could probably tell Eliot that Cheetahs were in danger of inbreeding and extinction, and he could probably be made to memorize a catchy phrase or make a poster about it, but he would not get it.  

So I began to wonder, what is the very bottom level of science?  One that uses basic science skills (observation, classification, comparison, measurement) to gather data and begin to make inferences into upper levels of science?  

The answer I came up with is Natural History, especially taxonomy.  All children can do basic taxonomy from very early on.  Ivy can clearly indicate that an animal is a cat, whether it be a gray cat, and orange cat, or a brown cat with stripes.  She also knows that cats are not dogs, and dogs and cats are not birds, nor are they snakes.  At 18 months, she has an inborn ability and desire to identify and classify.  As she gets older, she will start to compare and contrast like Eliot, and continue to build on her natural skills of animal (and plant) classification.  

And it all makes perfect sense, as a basis for future scientific learning, biology especially.  I’ll explain why in my next post, with my Best Biology Project Ever. 

Hierarchy of Learning

In one of my endless google rambles, I came across a rather interesting article by someone whose general life philosophy I don't agree with, but whose commentary on education made excellent sense.  The article is called the Hierarchy of Learning, and discusses the rather strange way we teach science, topic by topic, in a way that requires the student to simply trust the teacher's information, and memorize unconnected facts. 

Instead, the author suggests teaching science in a way that follows the way scientific knowledge was acquired by humans in the first place, from basic principles to more complex.  In this way, scinece not only serves as a science course, but also a history of science course.  Also, by covering the most basic things first, any hands-on experiments are age-appropriate. 

Now that all sounds well and good.  But the author did not go so far as to actually make an outline of how or when subjects should be taught, so I'm back to the drawing board for coming up with a history of science and science curriculum. 

In the mean time, Eliot can now identify oak and maple leaves, though we'll have to get a local guide to pinpoint the exact species we have here.