High School science, what a waste of money...venting

[titianmom]

Am I the only one who feels that science labs are a total sham? Am I the only one out there that knows that kids can learn everything just as easily watching a video?

 

My husband and I both went through college, BTW; did the lab thing. Even enjoyed the classes and got all A's. (I"m Computer Science, he's an Economics major...)

 

Both of us felt the labs were a total waste there, too. Learned nothing from the lab that we couldn't have gotten from a book or video. High School? All A's (not boasting, just sayin'). I remember us kids goofing off and not paying much attention and not learning a thing in lab. Don't even remember what we did in Biology, etc. Obviously another waste of time.

 

But in my family, lecture is very effective--we don't need the touchie-feelie, hands-on stuff, anyway, and our daughter is no different. Yep, we fork out the hundreds of dollars every year and yep, we know its required...which is *why* we force ourselves to fork out the dough every year...

 

But we can't be the only ones out there who think this is a total waste of time and money.

 

I'm getting ready to blow another $300 for overpriced, practically nothing useful items, that we'll spend a couple of hours playing with and won't be able to get rid of afterward. Sigh...all to put the lab down on the transcript.

 

Guess its the price of homeschooling. Bend over and just take it like a mom, ha! :)

 

Kim

PS: My daughter is considering becoming a nurse. She says to me, "Mom, why do I need to do the lab, I "got it" already...."

 

My question and sentiments, exactly, child.

[regentrude]

Am I the only one who feels that science labs are a total sham? Am I the only one out there that knows that kids can learn everything just as easily watching a video?

 

Both of us felt the labs were a total waste there, too. Learned nothing from the lab that we couldn't have gotten from a book or video. .

 

I think that depends entirely on the quality of the lab. Labs that are more demonstrations, yes, they would be quite useless for us, too. But here are the extremely valuable things DD has learned in her science labs we did at home so far:

1. experimentation: isolating parameter to be varied one at a time, keeping other parameters constant, careful handling of chemicals, measuring techniques

2. documentation: how to keep a lab notebook, how to document raw data, conclusions, guesses; how to write a comprehensive lab report

3. analysis: numerical manipulation of raw data, statistics, error analysis, fitting, visualization of results (choosing appropriate range of data to be plotted, choosing what function of data to plot as a function of variable)

 

None of these things are skills she could have learned from a lecture.

So, I would urge you to look beyond the "demonstration" type lab and look for skills acquired in lab work that are overarching and that will be retained after the details of the specific experiment are forgotten. Maybe what you need are just better labs.

 

ETA: I am a theorist and disliked labs in college. But (by consensus with my fellow students) the labs were our hardest, most rigorous class where we learned a ton!

Edited July 20, 2012 by regentrude

[BakersDozen]

Learned nothing from the lab that we couldn't have gotten from a book or video.

For us, this may be true yet the hands-on aspect of labs is what makes science come alive. My dc may not remember everything they read or even see yet they can discuss details of labs they did a few years ago. I love the interaction labs bring among my dc; nothing like having a 6yo's nose stuck right in among her siblings while they do an experiment/dissection! :D If it wasn't for labs I think I'd lose my mind (as would some of my dc) as the majority of textbooks bore me to tears. Give me hundreds of dollars in lab equipment/supplies over an expensive textbook any day!

[Sebastian (a lady)]

I've been reading through Knight's book Five Easy Lessons on teaching physics. The first part of the book spends quite a bit of time on what students think is true that isn't really so. One of the examples is a set of several electrical circuits with a battery and lightbulb(s). In each picture you're asked to identify which lightbulb would be brightest.

 

So I spent about $20 on wire, connections, lamp bases and bulbs and set my 12 yo to making the circuits. He had a blast and learned a ton. About a week later I gave the same pile of stuff to my 9 yo, who also learned a bunch (including how to strip wire and that he really ought not short out the lamp base with the tip of the screwdriver).

 

Could I have given them a chapter to read? Sure. And I did hand the 9 yo a book to help him understand what he'd seen. But they also now have very real mental images of simple circuits, including those in series, parallel and with a simple switch.

[Brenda in MA]

I think that depends entirely on the quality of the lab. Labs that are more demonstrations, yes, they would be quite useless for us, too. But here are the extremely valuable things DD has learned in her science labs we did at home so far:

1. experimentation: isolating parameter to be varied one at a time, keeping other parameters constant, careful handling of chemicals, measuring techniques

2. documentation: how to keep a lab notebook, how to document raw data, conclusions, guesses; how to write a comprehensive lab report

3. analysis: numerical manipulation of raw data, statistics, error analysis, fitting, visualization of results (choosing appropriate range of data to be plotted, choosing what function of data to plot as a function of variable)

 

None of these things are skills she could have learned from a lecture.

So, I would urge you to look beyond the "demonstration" type lab and look for skills acquired in lab work that are overarching and that will be retained after the details of the specific experiment are forgotten. Maybe what you need are just better labs.

 

ETA: I am a theorist and disliked labs in college. But (by consensus with my fellow students) the labs were our hardest, most rigorous class where we learned a ton!

 

:iagree: The right labs are not a waste of time. I think one of the most valuable things a student can learn in the lab is that there is a lot of thought that goes into designing a good experiment. Variables must be controlled, and unforeseen things come up all the time.

 

I remember doing one physics lab with my son where you were supposed to experimentally determine g, the acceleration due to gravity. It's supposed to come out at 9.8 m/(sec)2, but his data showed a low of variation. It took some thinking on his part to figure out why his data said that g = 12 or 8, because everything he'd read said it should be 9.8. He finally determined that there was some error in the measurements due to how the stopwatch was functioning. After that, a whole conversation ensued about how scientists really know what they are measuring and how the type/quality of measurement tools is very important. All of these lessons were very valuable for my budding scientist to learn.

 

Brenda

[regentrude]

I remember doing one physics lab with my son where you were supposed to experimentally determine g, the acceleration due to gravity. It's supposed to come out at 9.8 m/(sec)2, but his data showed a low of variation. It took some thinking on his part to figure out why his data said that g = 12 or 8, because everything he'd read said it should be 9.8. He finally determined that there was some error in the measurements due to how the stopwatch was functioning. After that, a whole conversation ensued about how scientists really know what they are measuring and how the type/quality of measurement tools is very important. All of these lessons were very valuable for my budding scientist to learn.

 

He certainly learned more from this experience than he had if he had gotten a smooth 9.8 right away.

[lewelma]

I definitely see your frustration, but the scientific method is not learned through lecture, but rather through trial and error. However, I agree that "cook book" labs are not very helpful to a certain type of student. I have discussed just this issue on this post . There is a lot more in that thread about the goals of scientific inquiry and how to adapt it to your student's needs

 

And have given a very detailed description of an alternative method (scientific investigation) on this thread . Although my son was in 6th grade when he did this project, it is a high school level project, so an appropriate example for you.

 

I am happy to answer questions on this method if you are interested.

 

Ruth in NZ

Edited July 21, 2012 by lewelma

[Jenny in Florida]

I think that depends entirely on the quality of the lab. Labs that are more demonstrations, yes, they would be quite useless for us, too. But here are the extremely valuable things DD has learned in her science labs we did at home so far:

1. experimentation: isolating parameter to be varied one at a time, keeping other parameters constant, careful handling of chemicals, measuring techniques

2. documentation: how to keep a lab notebook, how to document raw data, conclusions, guesses; how to write a comprehensive lab report

3. analysis: numerical manipulation of raw data, statistics, error analysis, fitting, visualization of results (choosing appropriate range of data to be plotted, choosing what function of data to plot as a function of variable)

 

I agree.

 

For what it's worth, I've recently decided to skip buying a packaged science kit for my son for next year, based in large part on my experiences with my daughter a few years ago. One of my primary concerns was that I thought the kit was just plain boring and didn't offer much in the way of actual experimenting.

 

So, instead, I'm putting together my own lab manual using ideas I've gathered from an assortment of books and websites. I hope it will be more creative and meaningful for him, and I know it's less expensive for me. I'm spending a total of $130 for everything: glassware, alcohol burner, chemicals, the whole shebang.

 

I do think hands-on labs are important. I just think we have to find the right way to do them.

 

(And, no, I don't think it's ever necessary to just give in to an idea or practice we think is stupid. I think there are always out-of-the-box options.)

[JanetC]

I have to agree with the OP's assertion that a lot of expensive science kits are really not all that interesting or educational. I also agree with the follow-ups that labs can/should be fundamental to science education.

 

Some of us are better at pulling together custom labs than others... So, for those of us who prefer as close to "out of the box" as possible, where have you found good labs--and which lab kits would you warn others away from?

 

Even if it's not a complete kit, where have you found good books or websites that at least do some of the heavy lifting of putting together a lab course?

 

Please, be as specific as you can in your reviews: Say what you liked/didn't like about it, don't just say the name on the box. Don't talk about what you bought for this year and haven't used yet. Talk about what you used last year and what you liked or didn't like from that experience.

 

And I'm :bigear: on this one and not contributing much. We really didn't do much with lab science last year, except that younger DD did a science fair project.

 

--Janet

[lewelma]

 

Even if it's not a complete kit, where have you found good books or websites that at least do some of the heavy lifting of putting together a lab course?

 

It is relatively easy to just augment any lab that you have to give it real investigation qualities.

 

Dissecting a worm? dissect 2 different kinds and compare and contrast what you find.

 

Separating mixtures? give your child a few different types of mixtures and make them figure out which method (evaporation, magnets, etc) to use to separate them

 

Making silly putty? change the recipe to design the "best" type. Define best, run trials, graph the results

 

Looking at organisms under the microscope? get 2 different types of water and compare what you find. Graph the difference, write a report. Try different filtration methods, and study the before and after microscopic life.

 

Just improve on any lab you run across and make it answer a question that you don't know the answer to. Then, it requires the scientific method with all the investigation qualities of real science.

 

Ruth in NZ

Edited July 21, 2012 by lewelma

[KAR120C]

Aside from demonstration labs vs. actual experiment design, there is something to be said for gaining the skills of operating in a laboratory. Safety procedures, not contaminating your chemicals, knowing what can go wrong with different effects, having a general sense of what's a reasonable result from various tests and when you get something really weird where it might have gone wrong or how you could confirm it...

 

DS has been doing field ecology labs the last year or so, and the difference between his grasp at the beginning and his grasp at the end - if the magical dissolved oxygen machine (electronic sensor) gives a crazy high reading, he can test the machine in a few different ways to see if it has a consistent error, or check the salinity value and recalibrate, or consider whether his sensor placement would affect it, or check what a stream with very very high or very very low dissolved oxygen might also have that would confirm or contradict the reading... None of which he would have learned without plenty of experience.

 

Even if he doesn't continue ecology past high school, all sciences have things like that to look out for - what's a likely range of values to look for and what could set them off? Is the voltage you think you're getting on the multimeter a reasonable value? or do you have it set to x1000? If your LEDs don't light, what are the possible errors and how can you distinguish among them? What different ways could you measure what you need (time, length, mass) and what possible sources of error does each one have?

 

Also there's a great deal of benefit in having some practice with writing clear procedures and keeping good data. There are other ways one could do that of course, but experiments (or even demonstrations) are a good one. What measurements are important? What assumptions are you making? What variables are independent, dependent, or held constant and how are you controlling them? What relevant information, expected or unexpected, do you need to be writing down as you go?

 

If you're going to be taking any sciences in college, or if you're working with a window of opportunity, lab time is limited - can you prepare your notebook before you arrive and know your procedures inside and out so you can get started and finished without wasting a minute?

 

I've honestly not bought very many lab kits... nor have I really liked the few we've tried. I've found biology and physics labs to be much easier to do at home than chemistry (although I do like "Loose In the Lab" books - they're pretty good for at-home work, and I think the company supplies most of the chemicals too). It doesn't have to be sophisticated to be worthwhile, but it does have to give you opportunities to answer questions you don't already know the answer to, and enough repetition to gain mastery of the relevant lab skill set.

Edited July 21, 2012 by KAR120C

[creekland]

I suppose one can learn everything they need to know about riding a bike by reading a book or listening to a lecture, but until you actually hop on one, you don't really know how to ride or what it's like.

 

Perhaps one can learn all the facts about the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef via a video or book, but until you are there, you don't really comprehend it all.

 

It's pretty easy for us adults, who have far more life experience, to "see" or "know" many aspects about what labs are doing in the same way we know the apple is red and the bear is brown when we are teaching toddlers, but it doesn't mean the kids know it (yet). And what they "know" mentally isn't "known" physically until they actually do it.

 

Then yes, we've skipped most of the book labs and made our own. Our kids dissected deer, fish, shellfish, chickens, etc, because that's what we eat. They've done plant experiments both in our garden and with weeds. They've tried physics experiments with rockets, both pneumatic (air powered) and engine powered. They've gone around our house and farm to find things to look at under the microscope - and identified bacteria and fungi. Chem labs can be interesting with cooking or just "playing" with what you have and seeing what happens (do watch the safety with some of that). Broken electronics are great to take apart (some end up fixed!).

 

Like others, I'm a theory person. Hubby is my hands on person. But I think all kids need to have samplings of both to truly "know" something. I don't want my chef or doctor to have learned all they "know" from a book... or video.

[Down_the_Rabbit_Hole]

Am I the only one who feels that science labs are a total sham? Am I the only one out there that knows that kids can learn everything just as easily watching a video?

 

My husband and I both went through college, BTW; did the lab thing. Even enjoyed the classes and got all A's. (I"m Computer Science, he's an Economics major...)

 

Both of us felt the labs were a total waste there, too. Learned nothing from the lab that we couldn't have gotten from a book or video. High School? All A's (not boasting, just sayin'). I remember us kids goofing off and not paying much attention and not learning a thing in lab. Don't even remember what we did in Biology, etc. Obviously another waste of time.

 

But in my family, lecture is very effective--we don't need the touchie-feelie, hands-on stuff, anyway, and our daughter is no different. Yep, we fork out the hundreds of dollars every year and yep, we know its required...which is *why* we force ourselves to fork out the dough every year...

 

But we can't be the only ones out there who think this is a total waste of time and money.

 

I'm getting ready to blow another $300 for overpriced, practically nothing useful items, that we'll spend a couple of hours playing with and won't be able to get rid of afterward. Sigh...all to put the lab down on the transcript.

 

Guess its the price of homeschooling. Bend over and just take it like a mom, ha! :)

 

Kim

PS: My daughter is considering becoming a nurse. She says to me, "Mom, why do I need to do the lab, I "got it" already...."

 

My question and sentiments, exactly, child.

I am curious to know what type of curriculum is this expensive. I can see initial lab equipment (Microscope) but that is a one time purchase. All lab material I have purchased over the many years of homeschooling has been used more then once or contains enough for more then one use. I'm on my 3rd High schooler and his Biology curriculum plus supplies cost well under $100.

 

Originally Posted by regentrude

I think that depends entirely on the quality of the lab. Labs that are more demonstrations, yes, they would be quite useless for us, too. But here are the extremely valuable things DD has learned in her science labs we did at home so far:

1. experimentation: isolating parameter to be varied one at a time, keeping other parameters constant, careful handling of chemicals, measuring techniques

2. documentation: how to keep a lab notebook, how to document raw data, conclusions, guesses; how to write a comprehensive lab report

3. analysis: numerical manipulation of raw data, statistics, error analysis, fitting, visualization of results (choosing appropriate range of data to be plotted, choosing what function of data to plot as a function of variable)

 

:iagree:

[Mom22ns]

I agree with most of the feedback you have already received. I think the type of lab is important. I think the goal of labs varies from learning how to find an answer, learning how to analyze and record data, all the way to just physically experiencing what you are seeing.

 

I think labs are more valuable to some students than other. My ds does not learn from labs. He has multiple disabilities that make focussing on physically manipulating the components of the lab and learning mutually exclusive. However, he can do the lab or watch a lab and spend time analyzing, what happened? why did it happen? what could have been changed to make something else happen? why do we care? This student would do just as well watching video labs. My more kinesthetic dd does not learn if she doesn't see feel and touch what she is doing. Labs make learning come alive.

 

For both of these learners labs make science fun. Attitude has a lot to do with that.

 

Labs do not have to cost $300/yr. I have a science degree and I love doing labs with my kids. We typically spend about $100/year on lab supplies. I don't use kits that make you buy what you don't need and I don't use disposable supplies if there is a good reusable option. As a result, by the end of elementary we had a decent small set of lab tools accumulated. At the end of Jr. High our lab shelves were getting well stocked and now in high school, our lab would be the envy of many small schools. I choose carefully what I buy for its usefulness. When a single lab would cost $20 and have little that I could reuse, we watch it on video. When I can add a $5 piece of equipment or one or two chemicals that will be used again for the next child passing through, we do it. We physically do at least one lab per week per child.

 

Physics and Biology are much cheaper than Chemistry. Buying chemicals makes chemistry the most expensive year of lab science here.

[Candid]

Aside from demonstration labs vs. actual experiment design, there is something to be said for gaining the skills of operating in a laboratory. Safety procedures, not contaminating your chemicals, knowing what can go wrong with different effects, having a general sense of what's a reasonable result from various tests and when you get something really weird where it might have gone wrong or how you could confirm it...

 

DS has been doing field ecology labs the last year or so, and the difference between his grasp at the beginning and his grasp at the end - if the magical dissolved oxygen machine (electronic sensor) gives a crazy high reading, he can test the machine in a few different ways to see if it has a consistent error, or check the salinity value and recalibrate, or consider whether his sensor placement would affect it, or check what a stream with very very high or very very low dissolved oxygen might also have that would confirm or contradict the reading... None of which he would have learned without plenty of experience.

 

Even if he doesn't continue ecology past high school, all sciences have things like that to look out for - what's a likely range of values to look for and what could set them off? Is the voltage you think you're getting on the multimeter a reasonable value? or do you have it set to x1000? If your LEDs don't light, what are the possible errors and how can you distinguish among them? What different ways could you measure what you need (time, length, mass) and what possible sources of error does each one have?

 

Also there's a great deal of benefit in having some practice with writing clear procedures and keeping good data. There are other ways one could do that of course, but experiments (or even demonstrations) are a good one. What measurements are important? What assumptions are you making? What variables are independent, dependent, or held constant and how are you controlling them? What relevant information, expected or unexpected, do you need to be writing down as you go?

 

If you're going to be taking any sciences in college, or if you're working with a window of opportunity, lab time is limited - can you prepare your notebook before you arrive and know your procedures inside and out so you can get started and finished without wasting a minute?

 

I've honestly not bought very many lab kits... nor have I really liked the few we've tried. I've found biology and physics labs to be much easier to do at home than chemistry (although I do like "Loose In the Lab" books - they're pretty good for at-home work, and I think the company supplies most of the chemicals too). It doesn't have to be sophisticated to be worthwhile, but it does have to give you opportunities to answer questions you don't already know the answer to, and enough repetition to gain mastery of the relevant lab skill set.

 

I suppose one can learn everything they need to know about riding a bike by reading a book or listening to a lecture, but until you actually hop on one, you don't really know how to ride or what it's like.

 

Perhaps one can learn all the facts about the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef via a video or book, but until you are there, you don't really comprehend it all.

 

It's pretty easy for us adults, who have far more life experience, to "see" or "know" many aspects about what labs are doing in the same way we know the apple is red and the bear is brown when we are teaching toddlers, but it doesn't mean the kids know it (yet). And what they "know" mentally isn't "known" physically until they actually do it.

 

Then yes, we've skipped most of the book labs and made our own. Our kids dissected deer, fish, shellfish, chickens, etc, because that's what we eat. They've done plant experiments both in our garden and with weeds. They've tried physics experiments with rockets, both pneumatic (air powered) and engine powered. They've gone around our house and farm to find things to look at under the microscope - and identified bacteria and fungi. Chem labs can be interesting with cooking or just "playing" with what you have and seeing what happens (do watch the safety with some of that). Broken electronics are great to take apart (some end up fixed!).

 

Like others, I'm a theory person. Hubby is my hands on person. But I think all kids need to have samplings of both to truly "know" something. I don't want my chef or doctor to have learned all they "know" from a book... or video.

 

I tend to mostly agree with you about labs in terms of doing actual science most labs aren't really experiments but demonstrations. BUT these two posts hit on something important, something I learned in CHEM 11 lab my freshmen year of college. I thought I wanted to major chemistry, did the book work great and in high school we only watched the teacher do things and mostly stupid things like making explosions.

 

Enter the titration: it's a tedious procedure to determine, as a recall the % of something. Notice my word: tedious. I hated it! Some how the book learning didn't really give me a sense of what I was doing and I had to be precise and take careful notes; none of which were part of my personality or experience as a freshmen.

 

And there was also the fear factor which I had not hit either.

 

In the end I picked something to major in that more suited my personality.

 

But I also know that if I had a better lab experience in high school in a setting with more help and feedback, I might have gotten past that first horrible impression of chem lab and gone further with it. I don't know and I'm still not sure a lab environment would have been the right one for me anyway, but at least I would have had a broader base to make that choice.

[KAR120C]

Enter the titration: it's a tedious procedure to determine, as a recall the % of something. Notice my word: tedious. I hated it! Some how the book learning didn't really give me a sense of what I was doing and I had to be precise and take careful notes; none of which were part of my personality or experience as a freshmen.

Titration is tedious... actually a lot of science is tedious. Very few explosions, lots of repetitive measurements. And there's no shortcut -- carelessness makes for unreliable data. If you're not excited by the answers it gives you, you'll never make it through the work! DS did a science project one year that involved sitting in an empty parking lot for three days straight watching algae photosynthesize in an aquarium. Drying paint has nothing on this. :glare: But the data! Seeing the patterns that show up in all those numbers is thrilling and almost worth the long days and the sunburn! LOL

[regentrude]

Titration is tedious... actually a lot of science is tedious. Very few explosions, lots of repetitive measurements.

 

Yep. In college, we once had to take 2,500 measurements and plot them on mm graph paper by hand. But that is quite similar to what scientists actually do - my experimentalist friends often spend weeks collecting data on a single experiment.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

I knew a woman who was putting her marine biology degree to use in a study of wetlands health in FL. She caught fish in a net, dried them, ground them up, then put them through a spectrometer to measure contamination.

 

My BIL is an astrophysicist doing work on neutrinos. He spends a lot of his time working 5 miles underground in a nickle mine because the mountain provides the best shielding from background radiation. (And when I say a lot of time, I mean weeks and months at a time with each trip down and back up requiring depressurization as if he were doing deep submergence.

 

You don't get to discover a comet every day.

[Candid]

Titration is tedious... actually a lot of science is tedious. Very few explosions, lots of repetitive measurements. And there's no shortcut -- carelessness makes for unreliable data. If you're not excited by the answers it gives you, you'll never make it through the work! DS did a science project one year that involved sitting in an empty parking lot for three days straight watching algae photosynthesize in an aquarium. Drying paint has nothing on this. :glare: But the data! Seeing the patterns that show up in all those numbers is thrilling and almost worth the long days and the sunburn! LOL

 

I think that about sums up what I liked a whole lot more about statistics: the computer did all the tedious part! I just got to look at data.

[bugs]

I think that depends entirely on the quality of the lab. Labs that are more demonstrations, yes, they would be quite useless for us, too. But here are the extremely valuable things DD has learned in her science labs we did at home so far:

1. experimentation: isolating parameter to be varied one at a time, keeping other parameters constant, careful handling of chemicals, measuring techniques

2. documentation: how to keep a lab notebook, how to document raw data, conclusions, guesses; how to write a comprehensive lab report

3. analysis: numerical manipulation of raw data, statistics, error analysis, fitting, visualization of results (choosing appropriate range of data to be plotted, choosing what function of data to plot as a function of variable)

 

None of these things are skills she could have learned from a lecture.

So, I would urge you to look beyond the "demonstration" type lab and look for skills acquired in lab work that are overarching and that will be retained after the details of the specific experiment are forgotten. Maybe what you need are just better labs.

 

ETA: I am a theorist and disliked labs in college. But (by consensus with my fellow students) the labs were our hardest, most rigorous class where we learned a ton!

 

:iagree: Demonstration "labs" is what I consider very irritating. It seemed when I first started homeschooling, these kind of "experiments" were all I found.

[KAR120C]

I think that about sums up what I liked a whole lot more about statistics: the computer did all the tedious part! I just got to look at data.

I'm on the statistics/ data end myself - might contribute to my bias... ;)

[Supertechmom]

Okay I want to jump in and ask a question......if you are doing AP sciences, how do you manage this type of inquiry and fulfill AP labs? I tend to find them demo at best. I'm not a science person so how would you adapt AP labs? Last year for chem, we just got the lab book and basically repeated the labs. Nothing exciting at all. This year we are tackling Ap biology and Ap chem and would like to have exciting labs and not the cookie cutter type but I don't know how.

[titianmom]

Yes, I think many here understand and have explained it better than I - lots of demo, not much experimenting going on. Thanks for the suggestions of adding some excitement to the labs instead of just doing what is expected to get the check mark on it.

 

The $300 is for Chemistry this year, thus the extra expense. I try to reuse items as well, but sometimes I only save a few bucks. I only have one child, too. If I had several children, then it would be worth it to me, you know?

 

Thanks again, Kim