Science as a Skill

When I wrote the post How to Talk About What I Don't Like, I really wanted to get around to saying, "Here's what I want to do differently." I am creating a label for posts called To Do Differently. The "What I Don't Like" post is full of me understanding that schools aren't all bad, and teachers are mostly good. I guess I feel the need to put that out there before I launch a series of posts about wanting to be different from school. But, I can't shy away from the fact that I'm not planning on homeschooling for the sake of recreating a school environment at home. Wish we could call it "Whole World Learning" instead of homeschooling. So, here's my first thought about a subject to approach in a non-traditional way.

I hear people talking about the "skills" subjects, and they mean language arts and math. These build cumulatively and give you the skills you need to study other subjects. Then they talk about the "content" subjects, like history and science. The idea is that these content subjects are full of ideas to learn and explore, but you won't get too far in them if you can't read and compute.

I am taken with the idea of studying science as a set of skills that leads to understanding content. Real science, I think, is not memorizing Newton's laws, but asking why. Why do the rock and the feather fall the way that they do? What can we infer from our observations? What would prove our hypothesis wrong? This type of analysis and critical thinking is certainly a skill that grows with practice. I think it's very challenging to commit to teach this way. We can pay lip service to it, and ultimately just lead students through a rather scripted discussion that concludes where the grownups have decided it needs to. And that's not half bad, but wouldn't it be better to give the student the time and space to really find out for themselves? It seems that homeschooling is ideal for providing this luxury of intellectual freedom.

I have found a science curriculum developed with these principles called Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. The author's introduction helped me to formulate my ideas about teaching science. I look at a lot of curricula, but there are few that I buy years before I'll be needing them. In fact, this is the only elementary age curriculum I've purchased. It was just so affordable and intriguing. It consists of four strands (parentheticals are mine):
A. Nature of Matter (Chemistry)
B. Life Science (Biology)
C. Physical Science (Physics)
D. Earth and Space Science (Geology, Astronomy)

Wow. An elementary science curriculum that not only goes beyond nature study, but leads to comprehending the foundational principles of the major scientific fields. This is achieved using the scientific method, not fill-in-the-blanks and multiple choice worksheets. That's something I'd like to do differently.