DS HATES hands-on science....

[Michelle T]

Anyone else have a child like this? DS is 12, not too interested in science anyway, and hates anything hands-on. His preference is to simply read various science books with lots of interesting illustrations and brief information, such as Usborne books, or graphic novel nonfiction.

 

Since I'm not too keen on hands-on myself, I'm leaning towards making life simple, and assigning him various Usborne, Kingfisher, DK type science books to read on his own.

 

Question - is there any reason a middle school age child MUST do science hands-on?

 

Question - what would you add in to be sure he is actually LEARNING from his readings, not just staring at the pictures?

Michelle T

[mrsanniep]

Ha! I just hopped on here to see if there were any posts about the OPPOSITE problem! I think my son would prefer more hands-on stuff.

 

Right now (literally, as I type), my 7-year-old is moaning and groaning his way through a DK Animal Encyclopedia ... four pages of it, that is (we're currently learning about animals). Every other day I assign him 4-6 pages to read and he has to write several sentences about each topic (right now we're on birds, so he's writing summaries about the different families of birds he reads about). If I'm feeling particularly "evil," I throw in an illustration for him to color. All his pages and pictures go into a "Life Science" binder.

 

I don't know exactly how this translates to a 12-year-old, but you could assign him his reading and ask him to summarize what he read, filing his pages into a binder.

[cmarango]

I personally believe that science is mostly about understanding the scientific process. He needs to be able to ask a question, give a hypothesis, test this hypothesis, and then state a conclusion.

 

Maybe you could have him read about some of the older scientists and then "narrate" their experiments. What were they trying to find out?

What did they think was going to happen?

What did they experimentally do?

What were their results?

What have we all learned as a result of this person's work?

 

I remember doing something similar to this in my graduate studies microbiology class and it was very informative. I certainly felt like I was understanding the process without actually "doing" the work.

 

Maybe you could do a few of these to round out his scientific readings.

 

HTH,

Christina

[bigdogs29906]

Why not check out the book lists from companies like NOEO?

[amtmcm]

My visual learner loves A Beka Science books which she reads in addition to doing Rainbow. A Beka is very colorful with beautiful pictures, thorough text and tests to check for retention.

[Larissa]

My oldest didn't like doing hands-on experiments either. She read, but she liked science so she read Apologia and ended up doing very well. She's took college physics and chemistry and is going to college.

I think even the Apologia author says that the experiments aren't that important, as long as you know what should happen and why.

Larissa in Nj

[EKS]

You could use the Prentice Hall Science Explorer books. They are written at the middle school level and have lots of pictures. They have lots of activities that you can do if you want to or just skip. You could even just read through the instructions for the activity and talk about what would happen without doing it. They have comprehension questions at the end of each section that are pretty straightforward. You could have him answer those orally to be sure he got something out of the reading.

 

I prefer the SE books to DK type books because the concepts are developed more thoroughly.

[Quad Shot Academy]

You might try this series:

http://rainbowresource.com/prodlist.php?sid=1238764272-1204018&subject=11&category=2810

 

In addition to lots of reading, it has book lists for even more reading, but is also has worksheets to make sure the kids are picking up on the vocabulary and scientific theory that they should be.

[Jean in Wisc]

My visual learner loves A Beka Science books which she reads in addition to doing Rainbow. A Beka is very colorful with beautiful pictures, thorough text and tests to check for retention.

 

I second this. My non-hands-on children liked ABeka a lot.

 

Jean

[Alice]

As a science person I think experiments are important. I think it's fine to do less of them for a kid who doesn't like science but I think experimentation is an essential part of science. I like the idea of the above poster to narrate using the scientific method. But I do think the hands-on is also important.