Unschooling Science

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!

I am sort of a cheater when it comes to homeschooling science.  I had gotten a nice science book for my son called Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding:  A Science Curriculum for k-2 by Bernard J. Nebel, Ph. D a couple years ago.  At that time, I was still doing one structured school day a week where I would have my 7 year old son, who was 5 at the time, choose the books he wanted to work on and we would focus on some actual curriculum for a couple hours one afternoon a week and he often would choose this science book.  It is a very nice book that includes various experiments and activities that are geared towards more of a classroom setting, but we were able to alter it for a homeschool environment. So we would usually do one of these lessons every week or so and my son seemed to like it.  The only problem was that I am not a very science oriented person.  When I was in school, if science could be completely eliminated, I would have been perfectly fine with it.  I would only put minimal effort towards science to complete what was required of me, but I had little interest in this subject.  My son on the other hand loves it.  He finds science completely fascinating.  He loves doing experiments and learning about how things work and questioning every little aspect of science.  He loves animals, especially great apes and has a lot of interest in how the body decomposes after it dies and the make up of the human body.  I could care less about these things, but I will have to admit, I have learned a lot through my son.  He also loves combining things to see the chemical reaction and he loves to help cook and watch how the chemical reaction of foods changes it's consistency and creating nutrients to keep our bodies healthy.  I really am not a major cooking type person, but I have been more so once we started having children and especially after we got 5 hens who produce 3 dozen eggs a week during the warm months.  I do put effort towards science for my son's sake, I truly do, yes, I do, stop doubting me.  I have also discovered ways of exposing him to the subject by others who find it fascinating as well.

We have a local science museum nearby called Science Central.  A few years ago, they decided to create a science program for homeschoolers since homeschooling is so popular in this area.  So once a month, many homeschool families congregate to this museum where they have created a hands on science program for the kids where they will cover the basics of the sciences with chemistry, earth science, biology, robotics, measuring, and so forth.  This usually entails an hour long science class on various subjects and a science experiment where the children have the opportunity to participate and there is often something that blows up or makes a loud booming sound at the end of the experiments and the children end up shouting "I love science" or something along that line and it is all fun and merry and apparently very educational.  I have the two younger children who are 2 and 4 with me when we do this and they have no interest in participating in the science class or the experiments, so I take them to the play area they have available there or the snack area while my son is able to spread his wings of independence and do the classes and experiments on his own.  I often will let him explore the museum on his own too since it is very kid friendly and it is also very open where I can be in the upstairs level and look down to the other level to find my son running around and he seems to spend a lot of his time in the sewer area where they have a tunnel for the kids to crawl through that is supposed to be like a sewer and he just finds that amazingly interesting for some reason.  There have been times where I went down and checked on him and he was using his super hero abilities to go into the sewer and rescue frightened children who lost their way.  So this museum has always seemed like a very positive place for my son and I obtained a membership because it seemed like the most economical approach for dealing with this place.

It wasn't until recently when I discovered how much my son is actually learning in relation to science.  I noticed Science Central had a science quiz on Facebook and I asked my son if he would like to take the quiz assuming that he would probably not do well since he is only 7 years old and we would move along with our day.  Since my son is 7 and still a beginning reader at this point in his life, I read the questions for him and I would have an answer in my head that was wrong every time just like when I was in school and took a science quiz and my son would choose a different answer than I would and he got about ten answers correct in a row.  I was amazed.  I would read him another question and boom, he would get it correct.  This had me suspicious and then my husband decided to take the day off of work and have a father/son day and my son chose to have his dad take him to Science Central.  My husband had never been there before, which seemed strange since we frequent the place so often, but I thought it sounded like a great idea.  I am close to my oldest son, but it has always seemed like he had a closer bond with his Dad.  He is a daddy's boy while the younger two are more Mom focused. Well, his Dad went along with him and he even explored the sewer with him.  They went to an experiment and apparently it was one that my son had seen before, who knows how many times this has occurred.  My husband said that when the presenter would ask questions, my son would enthusiastically raise his hand and answer the questions correctly, like "what are the 4 states of matter?"  My thought was, there are 4 states of matter?  My son confidently raised his hand and said, solid, liquid, gas and plasma.  Plasma?  Since when did plasma become matter?  I thought.  He was correct and he participated in the experiment and answered a few other questions correctly.  My husband was quite impressed.  He shared this information with my mother-n-law who has not been overly supportive of homeschooling and her response was pretty much the same as my own. My 7 year old son who cannot yet fluently read is a science wiz and this occurred because I have found this resource and consistently followed through with taking him there to satisfy his interests that I do not share. 

This Sunday, we decided to go to a local milk farm where they had a little fall festival where the kids could pet some baby cows, climb a giant straw bale pyramid, get lost in a corn maze, play in a big vat of corn with a slide, eat ice cream, and exciting things like this.  Then we were able to do a hay ride/farm tour where we learned all about the circle of life of these 300 dairy cows who called this place their home.  I dragged my husband along on this adventure also.  So we road around on this hay ride to learn that this field of corn was used to create the grains that were fed to the cows and the cows were then kept in this large barn area and their manure would then supply the corn with nutrients.  The cows were artificially inseminated to be blessed with a baby cow every year or so to get their flow of milk going and there were only female cows on this farm and the farmer referred to them as 'the girls' just like we refer to our chickens.  They would get rid of all of the bulls and send them off to a bull farm to be tolerated and there were no bulls kept on this farm.  I am starting to see a pattern of how male animals often are not useful for us aside from being food, while the females feed us and can stay alive in the process of doing this.  I never knew a milk farm was managed in this manner until we did this tour.  We are more organic type people, so we would not drink the milk from this farm, but it was still educational and scientific.  My son was not as enthusiastic about this as he often is about other activities we do, but I hope he learned a lot about cows through this experience.  I know I did. 

These are some examples of how science plays a part in our unschooling family.  As a parent, I often act as more of a resource person than a teacher.  I know that I am not going to be able to teach every subject or a lot of subjects for that matter.  I am not a licensed teacher.  This, however, does not mean that I cannot teach and guide my child into an educational direction.  This is my duty at this point in my life.  We have chosen to go with this unschooling route of raising our children and I try to do this to the fullest as I pay close attention to their individual interests and passions even if they do not line up with my own.  The only way science can be covered in my world is if I have assistance, so this is the approach we use for this subject.  This is all a learning process, but I feel like we are definitely on the right track as my little scientist is born.