You, too, Can Teach High School Science!

Many parents are afraid to teach high school Science.  I understand that feeling.  I actually felt that way with Junior High Science!  However, since I had worked with my children so thoroughly in elementary, it just became continued learning!  Wait! Let me step back and tell you that when I taught First Grade Science, I learned a TON!  I finally figured out why tomatoes are classified as a fruit, when we learned to classify edible plants!  Second, Third, and Fourth grade were no different!  The only difference was that I had an adult view on the subject and it all made sense!  And since I was so excited to be learning all of these things, I passed that excitement on to my kids and they became excited.  (Plus, we were doing “camp”, so of course it was fun and exciting!) But, yes, high school was intimidating, especially since I had only had two Science classes in high school, and here I had students that I KNEW were going to want Chemistry and Physics!  

The first thing you need to do to prepare for High School Science is to build up your supply cabinet.  I ordered the glass beakers in elementary.  I ordered glass thermometers.  I order the microscope in 4th grade, and I ordered a NICE microscope that is actually still working.  I have taken it to be recalibrated once, but it was totally worth the $250 I spent on it in 1995.  But typically, each elementary year I would spend between $50 and $100 a year to get what I would need.  My big years were the years I purchased the microscope and then the year I purchased a balance.  By the time we got to high school, it wasn’t any different.  I’d pick up the few things we needed and there we were doing Physical Science.  But now I was integrating my Algebra into the Physical Science.  Wow!  Was this liberal arts mom really doing that?  On a side note, Biology has a lot of “consumables” that makes Biology about $250, and Chemistry has a lot of “hazardous shipping” costs that makes Chemistry about $300.  I remember purchasing $75 worth of chemicals and paying $200 to have it shipped!

I totally felt inadequate when I got to Chemistry.  I had managed to go to school for 17 years and never had to learn about the periodic table, let alone chemical bonding and reactions.  And here I was with my Science minded guy.  I tackled it the way I did everything else.  I figured I could learn it.  Sometimes labs felt miserable.  We would try it.  We would fail.  We would look it up on Youtube.  We would fail.  We would tweak things.  We would fail.  Sometimes our labs lasted 2 to 3 hours trying to get one experiment to work right.  I felt like a failure.  All along, my Science son is critically thinking, learning how to tweak formulas and equipment, with a huge sense of accomplishment when the experiment did finally work!  We got through Chemistry.  I felt like we limped through Chemistry, but we finished it with a full understanding, and that includes me!  Physics went a lot easier.  We’d be reading the book and I’d say, “Oh, that’s how my toaster works!  Oh, that’s how my blow dryer works!”  And each time he’d roll his eyes and laugh, “Mom’s learning stuff from our books again!”

Do Science Fair Projects

Science Fair Projects  - I started doing Science Fair projects with my children as soon as I could.  Fortunately we had an outlet, our school group sponsored a Science Fair, and a deadline, always a good thing, so we got them done!  We always started simple!  For my Kindergartner, I always started with their taste buds.  We’d study the tongue, we’d take a picture of their tongue, and then we’d map it.  Where are all of the taste buds?  Then we got to making cookies.  We’d make salt cookies, sour cookies, made with lots of lemon juice, bitter cookies, made with dry mustard, and finally sugar cookies.  I’d have them guess where they would taste it on their tongues.  They would rub the salty cookie all over the sweet, bitter and sour tastebuds and they couldn’t taste it.  But when they got to the salty areas, they could taste it.  What a GREAT way to figure out how our body was designed, even as a tongue!  Of course, we’d finish with the sugar cookies and everyone was happy!  Then I’d have them make their chart of their discoveries and wah-lah, you have a Science Fair project!  I’ve always tried to take things that they are interested in.  They don’t have to be original or super deep.  There is value to figuring out how their Thomas the Tank engine will pull their train car one way and repel it the other way!  And for them to learn the terminology:  hypothesis, method, data, just puts them ahead in the learning curve.

One year, I had my Senior, who was studying Physics, do a Science Fair project with his 1st grade

brother who was learning about gravity.  Together, they built a crude ramp, and used Matchbox cars and books.  They’d pile the books higher under one end of the ramp, the little guy would let the Matchbox car go and the big guy would do the measurement on the stack of books, time the speed per second of the little car, as if he were designing a mountain road.  Of course, they both had tons of fun working together, and my older son got a ton of praise from all sorts of people that he was willing to work with his little brother.

As an encouragement, I let them do whatever they wanted. Much of the time they just wanted to build something fun, and I would let them, but they had to work within the Scientific Method framework.  For instance, one year, my 7th grader and his buddy, Garrison, come to me and say, “We want to build a wind tunnel for the Science Fair.”  I turn to Garrison’s mom, and she said, “Well, I told them ‘no’, but if it was okay with you, it is okay with me.”  I ask them, “What question are you asking?  And ‘Can we build a wind tunnel?’ doesn’t count. It needs to have a question, a hypothesis, something that you can repeatedly test and then find the results.”  I’m thinking “limited resources, limited size, and how?”, but I didn’t say “no”. A week goes by, and we meet for Life Science lab.  They say, “We came up with our question.  We want to know which paper airplane design flies the best.”  And, that becomes the wind tunnel Science Fair Experiment.  Not only did they learn a LOT about drag, design, pitch and yaw, but they learned much more about regulating air flow.  

Where are they now?  Garrison is working on his PhD at Notre Dame in Chemical Engineering, after receiving his Chemical Engineering degree from USC; and Stephen, after receiving his Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Norwich University, a Senior Military college, is serving in the Army, hoping to be placed in the Signal Corp next February.

What else have we done?  We’ve figured out how glowsticks work and what causes the different colors.  We’ve asked the question about the best way to freeze ice cream.  

And found out that liquid nitrogen is the quickest.  We’ve asked about the best recipe for slime.

What recipe makes the best bubbles?  What is the best way to clean our hands?

What parts of our garbage do worms like the best?  

When my eldest got to college, he mentioned to me that many of the students in his Science classes didn’t know the Scientific Method.  He said after 13 years, he knew it inside and out, and it gave him a huge advantage while taking his Science classes.

So, maybe you didn’t get to start in the elementary years!  It is not too late!  Start participating in 
Science Fairs!  Start getting involved in high school Science!

Preparing for Your Own Science Camp

Start Science Camp when they are young!  I started with Elementary Science Camp - As a homeschool mom, remembering my earliest experiences with Science, I wanted Science to be different.  I had bigger plans.  I pulled out my Bob Jones Science Curriculum and I saw that there were experiments EVERY lesson.  Woo Hoo!  At this point, I had 3 little children, and my husband was starting his own law practice.  I opted to help him get his files set up and organized over preparing for Science.  So, what happened?  I read the first Science lesson with my son and we read about the experiment, while the little ones were napping.  He yawned and asked if we could do the experiment, and I told him “no” that I needed to get to work helping daddy and then get dinner going.  There was no way I could pull out that mess, do it and then clean it up, and get everything else done, during their nap time.  This pattern continued the entire month of September, and by December we just stopped reading the lessons in the textbook. 

I was wracked with guilt.  Here I had this curious little boy who really wanted to do Science and I had squelched him.  But, I just couldn’t see it getting done when I already had my plate full.  Making and cleaning up one more mess just didn’t seem like something I could add. I continued to let it bug me, all year long.

Finally, we finished our school year.  I could mark that we completed each book, except for Science.  I NEEDED to come up with a solution.  And one day I did.  It was June.  I looked at the book and listed what I would need for each Science Experiment and then I looked at the Teacher’s Manual and listed all of the additional items I needed for experiments to reinforce the Scientific principles. There were 12 chapters in the book.  Those elementary Science books aren’t very thick and I marked my calendar for 3 weeks in July where we would start Science Camp.  I announced to the kids that we were going to do Science Camp for 3 weeks.  They were pretty excited.  We had baseball camp, tennis camp, Vacation Bible School and now mom was going to be doing Science Camp.  Sounded great to them!

I spent the next couple of weeks gathering all of the supplies I needed, and I put them in paper bags.  The bags were labeled Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and so forth.  I stapled a list of what was needed for each Chapter and as I conducted a large scavenger hunt, I’d cross things off.  Of course, I needed to wait to get carnations and cabbage and those kinds of things until the week of, but I could put magnifying glasses, thread, needles, empty milk cartons, toilet paper rolls and those kinds of goods right into the appropriate bags.  Another thing, as I contemplated whether or not I wanted to buy the plastic beaker versus the glass beaker (First grade science needed 3), I ended up buying the plastic, because I was working with little kids.  Rookie mistake.  By second grade Science Camp, I purchased glass beakers or glass graduated cylinders because I realized that I was working towards a bigger goal than just Science Camps and plastic beakers would not hold up over a Bunsen burner.

On the Sunday night before Science Camp started, I told my children that we were going to start Science Camp at 9 am and that we would finish at Noon.  It was my experience that the kids in the neighborhood, during summer break, slept in, watched cartoons all morning and didn’t knock on the door until after lunch.  I figured that if we couldn’t finished a chapter in 3 hours, we’d just finish it the next day.  This was the time that my children first questioned whether or not this was a “camp” or a “school day”.

Monday morning comes, and I start with an experiment that is recommended in the Teacher’s Manual.  Next we reread that Lesson that we had started the previous September.  Only this time we DO the experiment.  The kids are hooked!  They fill out their notebook, complete their drawings and observations and we easily finish the 3 to 4 lessons that are in each Chapter, within the 3 hours.  I clean up the mess, and get lunch started.  We do this the first week.  Come Saturday morning, they are asking if they can do another Chapter.  I tell them “no”.  

We stick to the 12 work days, and we are done with the curriculum!  Day 13 comes, and everyone is ready for Science Camp.  I tell them no more Science Camp until next summer.  They are disappointed and I feel like I have just pulled off the biggest coup!