Science with living books, not textbooks, can it be done at the HS level?

[Nan in Mass]

I keep thinking about this, probably because my youngest has two years of almost-but-not-quite-completely non-textbook science on his high school transcript. It worked really well, for our purposes. But... we sandwiched those years between textbook years.

 

0-6th grade - TWTM

7th grade - Singapore's middle school science (more or less) (and natural history)

8th grade - Hewitt's Conceptual Physics (and natural history)

9th grade - Natural History (emphasis on field studies)

10th grade - Natural History (emphasis on experiment design)

11th grade - Community college chemistry 1+2

12th grade - Community college Intro Bio 1, Physics (calc based) 1+2

 

So:

Living books for 11 years - through 6th grade

Textbooks for 2 years - 7th and 8th

Living books for 2 years - 9th and 10th

Textbooks for 2 years - 11th and 12th

 

(The exception to the living books is that during 10th grade natural history, I had him read the sections we hadn't covered any other way of the high school bio book with the dragonfly on the cover.)

 

The non-textbook years gave my son a feel for what it is to DO science, gave him hands-on and problem-solving skills, and also showed him how to continue to educate himself about science as an adult. I wanted him to be able to read popular adult science books for fun. We chose natural history because I wanted my children to know natural history, but also because this was an area of science that was readily available to us and had lots of living books, and because it was to easy to come up with real questions that we didn't already know the answer to, to try to answer either by observation or by experimenting. (What a horrible sentence lol.) It is an area where it is very possible to learn through living books and hands-on experiences and mentors. The textbook years were an efficient way to cover the basic background information. They also taught my son how to learn from a textbook, a skill I considered very important if he were ever going to go to college, and a generally pretty important adult skill. I also think that if, as an adult, you want to learn the basics of something quickly, a textbook is very handy. My son agrees that it is handy.

 

In our case, my children learned quite a lot of high school level material through living books and experimentation, without me spending vast amounts of time designing a program for them and being an expert in the material beforehand BUT that was because of the area we chose. If I had chosen chemistry, for example, I would have had to have been a chemist, at least a good amateur (sp?) in order to incorportate all the proper vocabulary and take advantage of all the teaching opportunities as they arose, and here is the second major problem, there would have been far fewer of those opportunities. We spend our days surrounded by natural history ánd I know a fair amount of the vocabulary and the names of most of the plants and animals already. We don't spend our days doing chemistry. My youngest managed to absorb a LOT of physics because this was something that did occur in his life and he had people who knew their physics well immediately available, and he was interested in reading popular physics books, but there was still that third problem, a very important one, of doing practice problems...

 

Anyway, just some thoughts about why what we did worked and what I think are the limitations, in case anyone is interested.

 

Nan

[swimmermom3]

Nan, I always enjoying reading about how you do almost every subject because it is usually "outside of the box."

 

The only drawback is that you inevitably start me down the "What if I...?" path, which tends to be long and rather crooked, but the view and experience is well worth it.

[Dicentra]

But could you learn those things without an actual textbook? What if you have a list of things for let's say Biology that you know need to be learned...take that list and learn without a textbook. Chemistry math can be done this way (I would think)...you need to learn x, y, z and here is how to do it, now lets apply it to this problem.

 

 

Here's a list of high school chem topics:

http://chemistry.abo...hschoolchem.htm

Each topic is linked to a brief explanation and (where applicable) a worked problem. The explanations aren't the best and the worked problems are of the "easy" variety for each particular topic. I figured the list itself might be a good place to start - then one could find other resources for each of the topics but still, by following the list, make sure everything was covered.

 

Here's a list of the various types of worked problems that would be typical of high school chem:

http://chemistry.abo...kedproblems.htm

Again, these are "basic" examples and not problems that I would consider difficult. In Ontario, we would cover all of these over the course of Grade 11U and Grade 12U Chem (chem for university bound students).

 

Queen Homeschool has two high school level CM science courses. The third will be out soon. I am seriously considering Queen's for my high schoolers next year.

 

 

I took a look at the sample for the chem course and I would not consider that to be at the high school level. It looks like a very interesting way to approach middle school chemistry but (from what I could see) it is not high school chem.

 

I keep thinking about this, probably because my youngest has two years of almost-but-not-quite-completely non-textbook science on his high school transcript. It worked really well, for our purposes. But... we sandwiched those years between textbook years.

 

0-6th grade - TWTM

7th grade - Singapore's middle school science (more or less) (and natural history)

8th grade - Hewitt's Conceptual Physics (and natural history)

9th grade - Natural History (emphasis on field studies)

10th grade - Natural History (emphasis on experiment design)

11th grade - Community college chemistry 1+2

12th grade - Community college Intro Bio 1, Physics (calc based) 1+2

 

So:

Living books for 11 years - through 6th grade

Textbooks for 2 years - 7th and 8th

Living books for 2 years - 9th and 10th

Textbooks for 2 years - 11th and 12th

 

(The exception to the living books is that during 10th grade natural history, I had him read the sections we hadn't covered any other way of the high school bio book with the dragonfly on the cover.)

 

The non-textbook years gave my son a feel for what it is to DO science, gave him hands-on and problem-solving skills, and also showed him how to continue to educate himself about science as an adult. I wanted him to be able to read popular adult science books for fun. We chose natural history because I wanted my children to know natural history, but also because this was an area of science that was readily available to us and had lots of living books, and because it was to easy to come up with real questions that we didn't already know the answer to, to try to answer either by observation or by experimenting. (What a horrible sentence lol.) It is an area where it is very possible to learn through living books and hands-on experiences and mentors. The textbook years were an efficient way to cover the basic background information. They also taught my son how to learn from a textbook, a skill I considered very important if he were ever going to go to college, and a generally pretty important adult skill. I also think that if, as an adult, you want to learn the basics of something quickly, a textbook is very handy. My son agrees that it is handy.

 

In our case, my children learned quite a lot of high school level material through living books and experimentation, without me spending vast amounts of time designing a program for them and being an expert in the material beforehand BUT that was because of the area we chose. If I had chosen chemistry, for example, I would have had to have been a chemist, at least a good amateur (sp?) in order to incorportate all the proper vocabulary and take advantage of all the teaching opportunities as they arose, and here is the second major problem, there would have been far fewer of those opportunities. We spend our days surrounded by natural history ánd I know a fair amount of the vocabulary and the names of most of the plants and animals already. We don't spend our days doing chemistry. My youngest managed to absorb a LOT of physics because this was something that did occur in his life and he had people who knew their physics well immediately available, and he was interested in reading popular physics books, but there was still that third problem, a very important one, of doing practice problems...

 

Anyway, just some thoughts about why what we did worked and what I think are the limitations, in case anyone is interested.

 

Nan

 

 

This is a fantastic example of how textbooks and other sources can be used together to give students a rigorous, high school level science education. Woo hoo, Nan! :hurray:

 

For chemistry, it's going to come down to this - if the reason for wanting living books instead of textbooks is so that only chemical concepts are covered without working any problems, I just don't think it can be called high school chem. I would think the same goes for physics. If the reason for wanting living books is to relieve some of the (perceived) dryness of texts, that's a whole different ball of wax. :D For high school chem (and probably physics), you can't get away with not working any problems. You just can't.

[athomemom]

I think Queen's would make a nice spring board. I wish their lower level sciences had been available when my kids were younger. We are CM homeschoolers and Queen's looks well laid out to me. My boys always investigate further and I think Queen's would work well for many. We would start with Summer By the Sea. They also have two more high school level science courses coming out in the near future.