Science at our place...

...at least for now!  

I am a picture person, I like to see ideas in images and so when it comes to planning for our home educating, I find that I like to create a diagram to express what we are trying to achieve.  I find that once I have this image in my mind, I can easily evaluate whether the things we have been spending time on are the things we are aiming for in guiding the education of our children.  

For most learning areas, the kids choose what they want to learn about, with me guiding their learning towards the things we feel are important.  I find a diagram a really helpful way of keeping this in mind as the kids initiate new topics to learn about.

I shared my diagram for our approach to history in this post.

This is the diagram I have come up with for our approach to Science.  It is loosely based on the new National Curriculum for Science.  If the children don't know what they might want to learn about I just mention some of the suggested topics and they usually choose one pretty quickly - they all love Science, especially anything hands-on.

This term Nathan decided he wanted to learn about rocks, so we borrowed a stack of library books and I threw together a notebook of sorts for him to work through.  He can work through it fairly independently, and it allows for a degree of creativity which he enjoys.  I also find that because the note-taking parts of the page are smallish and offset by daigrams, boxes and other elements on the page, Nathan finds the idea of taking some notes less intimidating.  Once he has finished we will have the pages bound into a booklet.

I have added the Rock Notebooking Pages to the blog and you can access the pdf here. I am happy to share this resource with you, but please use it just for personal/family use and do not reproduce any part for profit or to put on another website or blog. Thanks!  I hope it is helpful. 

Here's some pics of Nathan working on his Rock Cycle experiment today.

 So there you have it - Science at our place!