ALmom
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| Posted: May 27 2010 at 10:01am | IP Logged
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Becky:
I had a few thoughts that might help you make a decsion from the plethora of stuff out there - and keep sanity in a busy time in your life in a subject that overwhelms. So much depends on your own vision, your children's ages, personalities and learning styles and the degree to which you will be hands in or outside observer.
If you have a text you already want to use as a spine, then flip through it to see topics covered. Pull out those topics - even let your child flip through and see if anything sparks a little excitement. But in this setting, your experiments will be a little more driven by what you need to help illustrate principles that are harder to grasp that the text covers. Then you pick from a variety of kits according to how well they correspond to your text and are not simply duplications of what is already in the text. If you are doing apologia, they usually have an experiment kit somewhere with a list of other items you will need. Depending on whether or not you see these as exciting or dumb, you might find this worthwhile just to save you the time of piecemeal ordering. In our house, we generally found textbook experiments to be too didactic, often obvious without the experiment and not open ended enough. The generally told you the steps to take and what you should see. That killed interest pretty fast around here. Just look at that and talk to your children to see what they think would really benefit them. Don't neglect to speak to your older science fan who is not at home anymore. He is likely to have some pretty decent opinions that will prove helpful to you.
If you are more experiment driven - then you still need to have an idea of what general areas you need to cover.(I often use a text to give me some ideas of big topics - ie table of contents - and then have things available according to something along those lines). Without a text as spine (but just as resource), you need more and a wider variety of open ended exploration. Plus you will want easy books that explain basic concepts or the big picture and some charts or cards that show vocabulary.
Let them look at the catelogue or on-line description of various things and see what excites them.
Have someone science minded look and see if it is really worth the price - a few kits that I thought were great, my dh said he could put together a kit in 5 minutes for pennies and save a ton. Now if my husband had not put these together for me, I might have ordered the kit, but I had the resources here to provide easily and cheaply so no need to spend the money. I wouldn't have known my husband could do this so easily and he wouldn't have known I wanted something like that if we hadn't looked over this stuff together.
These then are areas to build around - and an experiment kit that a child goes gaga over in a catelogue (obviosly you are looking at things that are acceptable to you in general way - just uncertain which way to lean) are more likely to be used.
You want to get the most bang for your buck based on what you want available. Then you know the basic areas where you want some experiments. Some kits in some places just don't have the variety of things you might want to do -but might serve as a great introduction to a general unit as a way to spark some excitement. Other kits would never work as a general introduction, but are great at letting the child mess around in a very open ended way discovering specific principles -
You kind of have to step back and decide what your vision is and what you really need to help you. What are the ages of your children, their ability to work independently if they are given a general task. IE some children want/need to be told do x experiment, someone else that simply kills any interest in x - so you have to give more open instructions - do an experiment related to - you might consider x, y, z or look at (list of experiment books with acceptable choices). The number of choices given, etc. are dependent on the child. When you have a hands on science fan loose, then the instructions are extremely open ended - pick a topic in x that you want to dig into more deeply and plan an experiment (with some idea jumpers or possibilities so that they don't stymie endlessly (ie they can certainly chose to follow something in a book like Janice van Cleave or use a kit in that topic area but the option of said child to design their own from scratch is clearly an option).
Select from a variety of different things that fit or meet your needs - don't limit youself to only one source of kits. Make sure at least some lend themselves to open ended exploration, and not just tell you exactly what to do and what the results will be. The step by step, tell you what you should see kills it for my science fan and this is more what is in the science textbooks.
Can you provide a set up where you are not having to present or lead the experiment - but where you make sure your child isn't just scratching their head overwhelmed trying to come up with something to do. If you can, then having all the pieces together isn't all that essential - you have a general budget, the child puts together materials list, verifies cost (generally asking dad about what something might cost) and then decide together if it is doable considering your budget. If it is, child copies list onto family grocery list and stuff is picked up before the next week. (We always shop once/per week and as long as it is on the list, it gets purchased).
Is it possible to put more responsibility on the child - ie when you read about topic A, child may chose to do x, y, z ( and then basically list every experiment possibility you have available in the house on that topic or some subset of these that are directly related to topics at hand). (We have also used a lot of Janice Van Cleave books for experiment ideas.
So, day 1 of science might be read for background or do a specific experiment to generate interest (in this case, then honestly, especially if I would have to lead it, it is easier to have everything already together in a box - nothing to remember to order, etc. because there is nothing worse than trying to jump start excitement with an experiment you thought you could do, but cannot because, gee what happened to our cotton balls).
Think about a reasonable balance of hands on work. Obviously, if your children are hands on learners, you will do more experimenting than the person whose children learn more from reading or looking at charts. If your children are very visual, don't overlook very cheap, inexpensive but beautiful summation of things. In astronomy, we have a lovely floor puzzle - you learn the planets and their order and relative size rather quickly doing this. I'm sure there are posters in school supply stores for $1 or so that have visual display or picture of terms used in Astronomy as an example. My extremely visual learners, simply don't retain a lot of vocabulary without a picture of what it is - so these simple posters teach more than a multitude of texts for some of mine. Another child is so fully hands on, that we do experiments about 1 per week (or if the experiment is more involved, then it may be that an experiment takes a week, we take a weeks break from experimenting and let him read from the various picture books or other supplemental sources before resuming). (He probably does more on his own, but some things I don't pester him about).
Then when you are ready or have done whatever enticing or reading you want, you ask the child to select an experiment. (I always list specific possibilities for my children who are not fans but I also allow for a provision for the child to substitute something of more interest on the general topic with my approval - to make sure it isn't just a quickee or too dangerous or way outside the scope of our budget unless they are willing to purchase some of the items). These things are things that are child led and directed - they make the shopping lists and check the house for items, gather them so they don't get used up and add to the family list whatever isn't already available. Obviously, with younger children, you may have to do more of the choosing or limit the choices to a smaller number of acceptable choices and may have to be more hands in. Younger children also need more help - so if you don't have an older child to help, then you have to consider your own ability and only give choices on what you are comfortable helping with. For me - that was close to zilch which is why I stuck with open ended exploration more - with the homescience kits,, .... These children, were very kinesthetic children so they had to have hands on. I am 100% NOT hands on, so if it was going to happen without utter frustration, it had to come from them. However, I'd also observed that they were always messing around with things and seemed to learn best this way - so I had some confidence that they wouldn't be worse off than before. How I chose kits had a lot to do with the topics we were covering and the needs of my children.
Now the day they chose the experiment, they have to glance through a few things deciding - and at the end of this process the child communicates the choice and provides you with a shopping list(and give the time that your child needs that is reasonable - ie if I have tons of experiments to browse through, I may allow a few days). We have our child write all this on our grocery list. We give plenty of time to explore and have plenty of non-textbook things available to dig more deeply into it on a very easy reading level.
Janet
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