Science and Discovery

We've been meaning to make a home-made volcano for a while now given Joseph's interest in all things dinosaur related! As luck would have it he was bought a volcano kit for his birthday, and so on Wednesday we embarked on making our landscape and setting up the vinegar and bicarbonate of soda volcano.

It was great fun, and all three boys enjoyed taking part. It got me thinking about science and the kind of experiments we did in school, most of which I don't remember off-hand, although I remember thinking it would be a good lesson if the Bunsen Burners were coming out! Sandra Dodd pointed out on the Always Learning list a few months ago that many 'experiments' are not science at all but simply the process of recreating a discovery that somebody else has already made. I think she's right, I don't remember any classroom science experiments that I embarked on without knowing the results I 'should' see.

Small children on the other hand are brilliant natural scientists and are constantly developing and testing theories about how things work and the world around them, in order to expand their knowledge and understanding. So while we were enjoying our volcano a couple of days ago, I was thinking about a game Joseph had been playing the day before which amounted to a pretty good spontaneous science experiment. He was playing with toys and flipping them off of a wrestling platform to see how far they would travel. In no time at all he was chatting about the size and weight of the toys, making predictions about how far he thought they might travel based on these factors, and experimenting with flinging them higher and administering different amounts of pressure to the platform! Here he is comparing two toy penguins...the man in front was in charge of the flipping!

Nobody told him what to look for or what he might find, he was playing and simply making observations which turned his game into a fusion of logic and creativity. Ultimately for Joseph this was play, the means he has used for most of his great discoveries to date! Children's play is serious business!

The discoveries I have made for myself have been the most powerful, so perhaps thats why I am so keen for my children to make their own, rather than following someone else's formula. When Joseph, Callum and Charlie are making discoveries for themselves they are creating. Creativity was limited to certain subjects when I was in school, although even in those I think its arguable how much creativity was really taking place. It's a wonderful advantage of learning at home that we can allow creativity to play a role in every area of our learning; creativity and logic are not mutually exclusive.

"The greatest scientists are artists as well" ~ Albert Einstein

 

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RAAAH!! - It's all about Dinosaurs!

Like many children his age Joseph loves dinosaurs. He currently makes daily requests for information about dinosaurs, much of it from watching films, animations and snippets of documentaries. He has dinosaur toys that he uses to act out battles, comparing their varying physical attributes and requesting predictions as to which dinosaur will win from Ollie and I. We play role-play games as dinosaurs too, acting out 'fights' with a bit of rough-and-tumble.

Joseph is interested in the way the earth looked when the dinosaurs were around and is fascinated by volcanos and extreme weather. When he draws, he often depicts scenes of stormy clouds and flashes of lightening that break the trees, with erupting volcanos and dinosaurs roaming.

A couple of days ago Joseph was making his usual request for dinosaur related videos on YouTube and asked to watch people going to see dinosaur bones in the museum. Afterwards we decided to make our own dinosaur bones. We collected sticks at the park and the boys all had fun painting them white.

I had planned that we might make a dinosaur skeleton picture by sticking them to black paper, but Joseph had other ideas and was determined to make something 3-D! We constructed a head, neck and body by tying the sticks with string. This was as much as Joseph wanted to do, he didn't feel a need to give his model any legs so we didn't! He said it was a Duckbill Dinosaur and that it's head was a crest. He put his dinosaur on a pile of blue wool and said this was the water! Joseph is a fan of Julia Donaldson's book 'Tyrannosaurus Drip' and it seems that he was inspired by the Duckbill Dinosaurs in this!

Joseph said he'd like to make a land for his dinosaur to live in, inside a box with volcanos! I'm sure this will be our next project. After the dinosaur was made he wanted me to film him playing with it, and then filmed me talking about it. When we made puppets recently at a workshop at our local gallery he asked to film his results in action there too. I'll upload these videos in a separate blog post.

The huge asteroid that hit earth during the time dinosaurs roamed the earth fascinates Joseph, and this weekend sees an impressive meteor shower in our skies that he has been talking excitedly about. He has asked us to set an alarm for the middle of the night so that he can watch them!

In just a few days Joseph's fascination with dinosaurs has touched on elements of history, biology, geography, literature and astronomy as well as role-play, art and craft and physical activity, just at a glance! What I really love about this is that I feel as though I am simply playing with him, enjoying his company and helping him peruse his ideas. We're simply having fun together, and this is possible because I know that wherever this play and his ideas flow, he is learning something thats meaningful for him.

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Sunshine, Freedom and Creativity

Today has been all about the sunshine! Chalking in the garden, filling up a watering can from a bucket of water and giving the plants a drink, and then drenching the chalk in water and drawing on a wet trampoline!

They observed and enjoyed the changing properties of the chalk as it got wet, and then again as the sun dried off the trampoline....and made 'muddy puddles' of course.

I'd have felt pretty disappointed if I had been hoping for an impressive chalked mural, but I was simply hoping for a bit of joy on their own terms, so we had a great time! It's all about testing things out for the boys at the moment; using things in different ways and seeing what happens to them. When they do this they make the 'things' they are playing with their own, and are automatically creative :)

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