How you can be sure your children are learning science at school
Science comes in many forms, and not all of it is taught while wearing lab coats
A reader writes: I am concerned about the science curriculum at my son’s school. He says he misses the classes where students would conduct experiments and mix chemicals to see the reaction. Should I ask the administrators to check the teacher’s reason for this?
Every teacher should have a lab coat handy. They could slip it on to give the kids a clear message: “now we are doing science.” Science is not just about pouring, mixing and watching the colour change or bubbles overflowing. It is about how the dinosaurs lived and what fossils are; how the layers of dirt tell us what was happening 1,000 years ago. It is about how we classify animals and plants; how things grow and develop.
Small children are not familiar with the different schools of science. Sometimes they are not even sure where reading ends and history begins. It is all lumped together for them. Cooking is science; physical education is science; history is science – but it is in how you tell the story.
Children will learn about Isaac Newton and his famous falling apples, eventually. After they have dropped thousands of balls in physical education class, or tested two basketballs to see which one bounced better.
Biology will become clear long after they squat by the garden path watching a beetle waddle up a tree, or the wings of a butterfly unfurl. They will dig in the dirt and find small shells trapped, and look at fossils that are the same and make connections.
The magic of crystals and chemical interactions are part of cooking, but you don’t put a lab coat on to prepare dinner. If teachers had a lab coat, children would see science taught nearly every day. But because they don’t change their clothes, students think the lesson about the ocean is not really science. They may not know what subject the food chain was part of but they won’t think it was science.