I love the set-up of the science experiments in Bigger and how they encourage scientific thinking. Twice now though, my son has come up with some very valid guesses to answer the "question" that have nothing to do with what we're going to do in the experiment. For example...the question "What causes changes in the seashore?" His guess was worms or other sea animals that dig and burrow in it, people walking or digging in it. We could replicate the digging - not walking (our 9x13 pan wasn't quite big enough for that
). I told him that he was right that the animals would change the shore, but we weren't going to experiment with that and asked him if he had any other guesses. I don't want him to think his guesses are bad if I always have to ask for something else, especially when they do affect the question, but aren't what we're going to focus on for the experiment. I guess another example was the 1st experiment we did. His guess about why things sink or float was "how they were made". He was thinking of big, heavy things that float like boats, so didn't want to guess "how heavy they were". (He told me this before we talked about the key idea, so we experimented accordingly.) The little beach ball we had and the coin were the same weight. So we talked about how there was more of the ball touching the water, so it had more to push up on. Anyway, I was just wondering if any of you had good ideas of how to respond to guesses like this? Or if you rephrased the question to "lead" to the answers you're going to experiment with? Or if it doesn't matter whether the guess has anything to do with what you're going to experiment with?
In Christ,
Kathleen
Most of the time his inquisitiveness is good, and occasionally my ears get really tired.