Any advice concerning lab reports or science notebooks?

[Greta]

DD is really interested in chemistry, so I ordered a book of experiments. I want to flesh it out by having her do lab reports or keeping a notebook. I took lots of chemistry in college, and every week it was: do the experiment, write the report. So I know the basics of how to do a lab report. But I've never managed this from the teacher's side of the desk. :) And I was 19-22 at the time, while she is 11, so I need to figure out how to make this age-appropriate. Any good tips or resources to get us started?

[Guest]

Dh is a chemist, so we gave dd a lab notebook early on. He showed her his lab notebooks and talked about why he kept them and what was in them. But we never had her keep formal experiment records until 8th grade.

 

In elementary school her notebook was a conglomeration: I took lots of photos of things she was doing, in progress and at the end. She glued them in the book and wrote captions; later, the captions lengthened and turned into short descriptions. If measurements were important, she wrote those down. If we had data sheets or drawings or formulas or anything else we did in conjunction with the program we were using, we taped those in as well.

 

She also took her notebook with her outdoors, drawing things she saw that she was interested in (I remember a tow truck and the mechanism for hauling up a car, which the driver let her push and operate because she was standing there drawing it) and airplanes at the aerospace museum. Other kids might keep records of animals or weather observations or things found at the beach or photos and notes about rock formations.

 

What happened was that she got used to the notebook as a tool for science in a larger sense. When we became more formal in junior high she had no difficulty writing more conventional lab reports.

[MerryAtHope]

I don't do lab reports until Jr. High, but www.donnayoung.org has some great forms and also a grading rubric that you might want to look at.

 

My dd is 11 and keeps a notebook--I just keep it casual and let her draw or write something in there about what she's reading, or her observations etc...

 

Merry :-)

[cmarango]

Although my dd is much younger than yours I will add some ideas for you as I have been thinking about science notebooks for a while now.

 

First, take two days for the experiment. The first day you should read through the experiment, gather the materials, and really understand what you will be doing. Then, you can talk about/record the purpose and hypothesis for the experiment. It's up to you if you think that recording the materials used is pertinent to your studies.

 

On the second day you would do the experiment and record your observations/measurements. When you have finished analyzing your data then you can discuss whether the results match the hypothesis. If you want to take it further, then you can discuss what would improve the experiment or how to expand on the experiment.

 

There is also a book about keeping science notebooks that I reviewed a while ago on my blog, but I can't access the title right now since I have limited capabilities while on vacation.

 

HTH a little.

[Greta]

Thank you all for the advice. We'll do a notebook rather than reports, and play it by ear as far as how much detail we should go into she. She loves to draw, and she loves science, so I think this will be a successful venture.

 

Thanks for mentioning the Donna Young site. I have used it for planners, but didn't realize that kind of stuff was available there. Cool!