Science Question

[Marty D]

Ok, so I am back with more questions. If you are tired of my questions, it is your own fault for giving me such great answers!

At this moment, I feel confident that I will switch my oldest son to HOD when we finish the core he is doing in SL. I would like to know more about science. My ds is 8 years old, and a science buff. Every day I have to force him to turn off the science or discovery channel and do something outside. He loves anything science. he loves to hear about it, watch it, experiment, etc etc etc. I am science illiterate!!!

So, I need a science program that keeps him excited, yet is easy to use. He loves hands on things, but again they must be easy to set up and do. Any suggestions.

Thanks for your time

[MamaMary]

Ok, so I am back with more questions. If you are tired of my questions, it is your own fault for giving me such great answers!

You are too funny! I'm not sure which program you are going to be using? (Bigger or Beyond?) The science in Bigger is very "full". The science in Beyond is perfect for my children, BUT if I had a science buff I "may" add some extra stuff.

[Marty D]

[/quote]

I'm not sure which program you are going to be using? (Bigger or Beyond?) [/quote]

Sorry, I forgot to tell you that I am planning on using Beyond.

[Jen in Va]

If you felt like the science wasn't enough for your science oriented child, you could always supplement with a book of experiments or activities from the library.

[pjdobro]

My children are really into science as well, especially my daughter. In looking through the science activities in LHFHG (which we'll be using this year) and Beyond, I found they looked like great fun with lots of hands-on opportunities that are age appropriate. Since my kids are such science fanatics though, I am planning on adding a little bit more. I found a book I really like, The Kid's Science Book: Creative Experiences for Hands-on Fun that I think I'll use along with LHFHG maybe adding one extra experiment per week. I found another kit that I think I'll use later on. It's from Learning Resources and it's called Spotlight on Science: Famous Experiments. It tells the history behind some of the famous science discoveries and helps to recreate those. It looks like it will be fun, but it is suggested for ages 8+ and my children aren't quite there yet You might want to look through the Beyond manual at all of the science blocks and see if it looks like enough for your son before deciding to get anything else. If you find you want to supplement, you could always try to expand on one of the blocks each week by using your local library to do a little more research into that area. I'm somewhat of a science buff myself so it is hard for me to leave well enough alone

[inHistiming]

You could also add in something like 'notebooking' to cover extra Science (or other) topics. It would be easy to get books from the library or use the ones you have at home, about animals, rocks, the stars and planets, etc. You could have your child make a notebook entry with drawings, clip art, coloring pages or written information (or all combined) and place it in your notebook. By the end of the year, you would have a full and varied notebook of science information. This is something that we plan to implement, though I believe Carrie starts this in Bigger anyway, which is what we will be using next year. There are many, many FREE resources online that you can download and use for a large variety of topics in Science, as well as any other subject. Do a search, you may find something you love!

A link I found today...suggested by Terri Camp, with free science experiments.
http://www.topscience.org/


If you would like more information on notebooking, pm me, and I can give you some great links to sites I've found on the internet.

[Melanie]

I had "big plans" to add some more science to Little Hearts this year....but...

Here's the deal. Science is secondary to learning to read (and I'm talking about reading books fluently as my goal this year) and math. There just isn't time to add a bunch of "stuff" to our day and still keep it short and sweet as per the CM philosophy. So, science has taken a backseat.

Here's how we have added some science and still kept our day short. We look up info on the animals discussed in the Burgess storytime books. There are lots of animals in those books and we have found a coloring page to go with each one on the internet and we have plenty of science type books around here to find other info about them. We also keep nature journals and try to add to that at least once a week. Those two activities, along with the activities from Little Hearts have been plenty. Last week, we caught some frogs and looked them up in our Frogs of Missour book to correctly identify them and added that to our nature journals. This week, we went mushroom hunting and drew those in our journals....and had a feast by the way on morels!!! Yum-o!

I think it's fine to add more if you feel you need to, but don't feel discouraged if your plans fall through. If you plan to much into your day (I'm speaking from experience here) something will fall to the side and you don't want it to be reading or math.

I was a first grade teacher for many, many years, and trust me when I say, science and history are not big in K or 1st grade. We only had to schedule something for each 1x/week and that was usually Weekly Reader and a Magic School Bus video! Believe me....Beyond is above and "beyond" (my joke for the day ) what you would be getting in any ps classroom.

I think you should give it a shot before you add anything else just to see if you have the time (or need) for it.

And don't worry about asking too many questions.....you're probably asking something that someone else wanted to know about as well!
Mel

[pjdobro]

Thanks Mel so much for sharing I know I have lofty plans that may or may not make it into reality. One of the things that I really like about HOD is that it is a compact but complete program in itself. So I feel like if we only get that done each day, then we're ok. If we have time them we can add on the other things, but I'm not going to stress myself out if we don't get the other stuff done. I actually had all of my other science books and such before deciding to use LHFHG as our core program. I have more books around here than anyone could possibly use in a lifetime and I just came back from a scholastic warehouse sale with more books


I love you idea for adding the animal study and nature journal. We've just recently started a nature journal and we're still trying to figure it out. I sure wish we could have been there to study mushrooms with you and enjoy the feast afterwards. I love morels and unfortunately I don't think they grow around here

[Kathleen]

One of the things that I really like about HOD is that it is a compact but complete program in itself. So I feel like if we only get that done each day, then we're ok.

Patty - I totally agree with you, and there were a lot of things that drew me to HOD, but that was definitely one of them!

Last week, we caught some frogs and looked them up in our Frogs of Missour book to correctly identify them and added that to our nature journals. This week, we went mushroom hunting and drew those in our journals....and had a feast by the way on morels!!! Yum-o!

Mel - it must have been the week for mushrooms! We spent my big 2 yo's birthday on Saturday in the woods finding morels and shed antlers! I'm planning to start nature journaling with my kiddos soon, too. (I've been ambitiously house cleaning this week...and as soon as I can move again we'll be outside. )