Are 18 labs "enough"? (How many?)

[EKT]

I'm putting together my daughter's 9th grade biology with lab course. (I'm using a mish-mash of materials: Oak Meadow's Biology, Holt Biology textbook, The Great Courses Biology videos, and QSL Biology NGSS lab kit.) There are things I like in each and I am trying to make it all come together, but the 37 labs in the NGSS kit definitely feel like too many now that I'm looking over everything. 

I am thinking of doing 18 labs--picking out those my daughter is most enthusiastic about--which would work out to one lab every other week (for a typical 36-week school year). Is this "enough"? The labs in the QSL kits are super thorough, so on the face of it, it feels like plenty. (And I think doing one every other week feels much more sustainable than trying to do one every single week. When I think back to my high school biology class, I know we did nowhere near 18 labs, yet I still got "lab science" credits. Not sure what is common nowadays.) 

Anyway, I would love to hear from others about how many labs you typically complete in order to legitimately call something a lab science. Thank you!

[freesia]

Yes, 18 is plenty.

[Clemsondana]

That is more than enough.  Having taught and TA'd labs at colleges, a semester of lab could have as few as 4-6 actual experiments.  Students worked problem sets for genetics and manipulated models of chromosomes and DNA in labs.  Students worked on doing metric conversions and learned to measure using graduated cylinders and triple beam balances.  There is value in learning how to do labs.  There is also value in learning how to set up and experiment, choose controls and variables, and write a good lab report.  If a student prefers hands-on learning, I"m all for homeschool families making that available.  But, I think people overestimate how much time public school/college students spend on labs.  In college labs, students wrote anywhere from 1-5 lab reports each semester.  In the homeschool classes that I teach, students average 1-2 hands-on activities each month but only a few each semester are labs with experiments.  Using a microscope is a lab, for instance.  

In case it matters, the TAing was at a state U, the teaching was at a community college, and my undergrad classes were at a different state U, where I took labs in biology, biochem, micro, physics, genetics, and chem.  Some differences were specific to the course content - doing fly crosses in genetics took weeks and had a big lab report, while micro had no real lab reports but had tons of skills to learn and things to observe.  

With my own kid last year, we planned every-other-week labs in chemistry but ended up doing 10 total.  

[EKT]

10 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

That is more than enough.  Having taught and TA'd labs at colleges, a semester of lab could have as few as 4-6 actual experiments.  Students worked problem sets for genetics and manipulated models of chromosomes and DNA in labs.  Students worked on doing metric conversions and learned to measure using graduated cylinders and triple beam balances.  There is value in learning how to do labs.  There is also value in learning how to set up and experiment, choose controls and variables, and write a good lab report.  If a student prefers hands-on learning, I"m all for homeschool families making that available.  But, I think people overestimate how much time public school/college students spend on labs.  In college labs, students wrote anywhere from 1-5 lab reports each semester.  In the homeschool classes that I teach, students average 1-2 hands-on activities each month but only a few each semester are labs with experiments.  Using a microscope is a lab, for instance.  

In case it matters, the TAing was at a state U, the teaching was at a community college, and my undergrad classes were at a different state U, where I took labs in biology, biochem, micro, physics, genetics, and chem.  Some differences were specific to the course content - doing fly crosses in genetics took weeks and had a big lab report, while micro had no real lab reports but had tons of skills to learn and things to observe.  

With my own kid last year, we planned every-other-week labs in chemistry but ended up doing 10 total.  

This is SO helpful, thank you!! 

[regentrude]

18 sounds plenty. 
There is no fixed number for it to "count". It all depends on the quality of the labs. You can do 6 thorough labs and learn a lot, or a dozen practical exercises that are mere demonstrations. Since labs are time consuming, I would choose carefully to select the ones that best illustrate the concepts I want my student to learn.

[pitterpatter]

Good question! We're pretty much doing the same setup as you minus the Great Courses videos (not sure how you're going to fit these in...lol) but with the non-NGSS QSL kit. Are you completing the lab activities in Oak Meadow too, or are you forgoing them? Right now, I have both scheduled but have no idea how we will finish on time. I suspect that we'll cut some of the dissections. We should probably save a few for Biology 2, but DD really wants to do the pig this year. 🤷‍♀️

I discussed the high school/college lab thing with DH earlier this year. Neither of us remember much in the way of labs. (I remember a smattering for Biology 1 and even less for Biology 2.) We don't remember writing lab reports at all. I have one foggy recollection of my college biology lab. DH has none. They must have been great experiences. 🤣

[Clemsondana]

Adding one more thought.  The usefulness of labs varies with the content. At our co-op, the middle school science class is all about dissections, while the high school course covers a lot of molecular biology.  The middle schoolers do labs at least every other week,and often weekly.  But, the labs are sometimes simple.  They dissect a flower, for instance.  It's a bigger deal when they do the shark.  There is some high school content that doesn't have a real 'experiment'.  One of my favorite weeks is during the unit on cell division.  I set up stations where students can look at and mess with a model of DNA while I point out various things, they watch a video of cell division happening where they can see spindles and chromosomes, they go to a microscope station and look at mitotic cells, they go to a station that has felt boards and directions for them to use pieces to simulate the process of DNA replication, and they go to another station that has pipe cleaners, beads, and directions to go through the steps of mitoso and meiosis, finding homologous chromosomes and sister chromatids at each step.  There isn't any real experiment to do to investigate these processes, but they do activities that increase their understanding.  This is a lab.

When we study ecology, I have them do a lab at home because we can't grow anything at a once/week co-op.  I don't care how they do the experiment, but they need a control, a way to measure results, and a variable.  They usually do something involving seeds - different soil types, different amounts of sun or water, watering with different liquids, etc.  The experiments are simple, but they realize that there is a lot to think about.  How do you determine the 'best' treatment?  Number of sprouts?  Height of seedlings?  Healthy appearance of plants?  How long do you monitor?  How do you decide what range of things to test - if you measure water quantity, how do you decide what your amounts are?  What is a reasonable hypothesis? I don't care what the experiment is - they year that people were stuck at home suddenly, students sprouted potatoes and measured mold on fruit peels and it was all fine - but the process of learning how to design even a simple experiment was good for them.  Most kit labs don't have a lot of flexibility, so you might choose when to do something like my 'stations lab' to reinforce a concept (which can be done with actual experiments, too - we do a cool osmosis one) and when the goal is to work on thinking through experiments.  

Edited August 10, 2021 by Clemsondana

[EKT]

8 minutes ago, pitterpatter said:

Good question! We're pretty much doing the same setup as you minus the Great Courses videos (not sure how you're going to fit these in...lol) but with the non-NGSS QSL kit. Are you completing the lab activities in Oak Meadow too, or are you forgoing them? Right now, I have both scheduled but have no idea how we will finish on time. I suspect that we'll cut some of the dissections. We should probably save a few for Biology 2, but DD really wants to do the pig this year. 🤷‍♀️

I discussed the high school/college lab thing with DH earlier this year. Neither of us remember much in the way of labs. (I remember a smattering for Biology 1 and even less for Biology 2.) We don't remember writing lab reports at all. I have one foggy recollection of my college biology lab. DH has none. They must have been great experiences. 🤣

Hi!

We are skipping the Oak Meadow labs entirely. (I did not buy the Oak Meadow lab kit; I bought only the Oak Meadow curriculum and will pair it with the QSL lab kit instead.) My rationale: I really like Oak Meadow Biology's scope and sequence, the way it follows the Holt textbook in a tidy way, and the general creativity of OM's offerings. So that's why I bought the curriculum, but we are definitely not doing all of the questions and activities, etc.! (For context, we're also using Oak Meadow World History and Oak Meadow Health this year, so doing all the activities in all these curricula would be impossible!) Instead, I'm going through each lesson and selecting tasks that seem worthy and interesting. I am weaving in the QSL labs wherever they fit, but again, we won't be doing all of them. (Basically, I like to do things my own way, but I like that OM curriculum provides a framework for me to work off of, so I'm not starting completely from scratch.) Stephen Nowicki (the author of the Holt textbook) is the teacher of the Great Courses class, so I am selecting videos that relate to the readings where applicable. (The Great Courses class definitely offers more than we need--there are 72 videos!--so we're not planning to watch all of them, but I plan to weave some in wherever they relate to the readings. I don't expect things to line up perfectly, but I think things will work well enough for our purposes. I keep reminding myself that this is a general, introductory class and no ninth grader is going to cover all of biology (lol), so I'm just chasing down whatever is fascinating.) 

To summarize, for each Oak Meadow lesson, my daughter will:

• Do the assigned reading from the Holt textbook.
• Take some general notes/note the most interesting or significant thing she learned from her reading in her notebook. (A brief narration, in her own words, in writing.)  
• Ponder a few of the Oak Meadow questions and/or do one or more of the Oak Meadow activities. (This will mostly be discussion and jotting notes, NOT a lot of formal writing. My daughter really wants to focus on labs this year. Plus, she will be doing a ton of writing across her other subjects.)  
• Watch a Great Courses biology lecture if there is one (or more) that pairs well with the readings. 
• Note the most interesting or significant thing she learned from the lecture in her notebook. (A brief narration, in her own words, in writing.)  
• Complete a QSL lab roughly every other week (Again, this won't work out perfectly. Some lessons might work out to have more labs than others, etc.).

Like I said, it will be a mish-mash, but I'm trying to keep in mind that my overall goals are to maintain my daughter's enthusiasm for science, to develop a solid understanding of basic biology, to engage in scientific thinking and inquiry and all that jazz, and to do lots of hands-on work, because that is what she is most excited about. 

I hope that helps! 🙂

[EKT]

24 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

Adding one more thought.  The usefulness of labs varies with the content. At our co-op, the middle school science class is all about dissections, while the high school course covers a lot of molecular biology.  The middle schoolers do labs at least every other week,and often weekly.  But, the labs are sometimes simple.  They dissect a flower, for instance.  It's a bigger deal when they do the shark.  There is some high school content that doesn't have a real 'experiment'.  One of my favorite weeks is during the unit on cell division.  I set up stations where students can look at and mess with a model of DNA while I point out various things, they watch a video of cell division happening where they can see spindles and chromosomes, they go to a microscope station and look at mitotic cells, they go to a station that has felt boards and directions for them to use pieces to simulate the process of DNA replication, and they go to another station that has pipe cleaners, beads, and directions to go through the steps of mitoso and meiosis, finding homologous chromosomes and sister chromatids at each step.  There isn't any real experiment to do to investigate these processes, but they do activities that increase their understanding.  This is a lab.

When we study ecology, I have them do a lab at home because we can't grow anything at a once/week co-op.  I don't care how they do the experiment, but they need a control, a way to measure results, and a variable.  They usually do something involving seeds - different soil types, different amounts of sun or water, watering with different liquids, etc.  The experiments are simple, but they realize that there is a lot to think about.  How do you determine the 'best' treatment?  Number of sprouts?  Height of seedlings?  Healthy appearance of plants?  How long do you monitor?  How do you decide what range of things to test - if you measure water quantity, how do you decide what your amounts are?  What is a reasonable hypothesis? I don't care what the experiment is - they year that people were stuck at home suddenly, students sprouted potatoes and measured mold on fruit peels and it was all fine - but the process of learning how to design even a simple experiment was good for them.  Most kit labs don't have a lot of flexibility, so you might choose when to do something like my 'stations lab' to reinforce a concept (which can be done with actual experiments, too - we do a cool osmosis one) and when the goal is to work on thinking through experiments.  

Thank you for this input! The QSL lab kit seems to have a good mix of these sorts of activities, so I am optimistic. (That's why I sought it out separately from the Oak Meadow curriculum; it seemed to offer a little more in this regard.) I will say that I'm pretty impressed with it so far, but again, we haven't actually conducted any of the projects yet. It's funny that you mention your activity above; the DNA model lab in my kit involves jelly beans, black and red licorice, and toothpicks, and the student builds/manipulates a DNA strand model. We haven't done it yet, but it sounds a lot like the sort of activity you describe above, so that is encouraging! Again, I appreciate the input!

[EKS]

More than enough.

You could even just do a handful of labs (or fewer) if you were to focus on actually developing scientific thinking rather than just following a recipe.  Both regentrude and lewelma went this route, and I wish I had done the same.

[Shoeless]

5 hours ago, pitterpatter said:

I discussed the high school/college lab thing with DH earlier this year. Neither of us remember much in the way of labs. (I remember a smattering for Biology 1 and even less for Biology 2.) We don't remember writing lab reports at all. I have one foggy recollection of my college biology lab. DH has none. They must have been great experiences. 🤣

I have no memory of writing lab reports, either. I had 5 years of high school science, including AP bio, and then went on to microbiology in college. The labs for micro were mostly learning lab skills, and not really experiments. I know I had written work to turn in for AP bio and micro. I remember messing around with fruit flies for AP and some dissections, but what we did was more like following a recipe, rather than designing experiments and testing a hypothesis. 

[Kassia]

I think 18 is more than enough.  We didn't do nearly that many at home with biology (dd hates science) but she took chemistry and physics with labs for DE so she had better labs there.  

My older sons went to public school and had maybe 2 biology labs for their honors biology class with no lab reports.  The honors biology teacher was so stupid - he kept asking my twin sons - who look absolutely nothing alike - if they were identical twins!!!  They don't even look like brothers.  They wrote a lot of lab reports for chemistry, though.  I can't remember physics.  

 

[NittanyJen]

11 hours ago, EKT said:

I'm putting together my daughter's 9th grade biology with lab course. (I'm using a mish-mash of materials: Oak Meadow's Biology, Holt Biology textbook, The Great Courses Biology videos, and QSL Biology NGSS lab kit.) There are things I like in each and I am trying to make it all come together, but the 37 labs in the NGSS kit definitely feel like too many now that I'm looking over everything. 

I am thinking of doing 18 labs--picking out those my daughter is most enthusiastic about--which would work out to one lab every other week (for a typical 36-week school year). Is this "enough"? The labs in the QSL kits are super thorough, so on the face of it, it feels like plenty. (And I think doing one every other week feels much more sustainable than trying to do one every single week. When I think back to my high school biology class, I know we did nowhere near 18 labs, yet I still got "lab science" credits. Not sure what is common nowadays.) 

Anyway, I would love to hear from others about how many labs you typically complete in order to legitimately call something a lab science. Thank you!

Yes, 18 labs is plenty. She can do pre-lab reading or write up lab reports in the off weeks. Pick and choose the labs that both make the most sense for your plans and that are the most practical to actually make happen (some labs, even in a kit, tend to me more aspirational than realistic . . .). When faced with something that feels like too much, I remember my mantra— “More isn’t always more.”