The Learning Umbrella

We are still using Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding by Nebel.  I see some drawbacks to this program, however.  The lesson plans are written in full-on, formal educationese, and I honestly don’t want to read that much to figure out what I’m supposed to do.  I’d rather have a bulleted list of steps, because I’m looking for something quick to skim and follow, not a huge chapter to read before I sit down with him.

But it’s still going well.  After our first lesson with sorting and categorizing, we had a lesson to learn the difference between solids, liquids, and gases.  Then we’ve had a few lessons focused on air, with a few good experiments from the book Let’s Try it Out in the Air.  We also read Air is All Around You, and Carbon seems to understand the tricky concept that air has mass and volume - that it weighs something.

Today we had the 4th lesson from the book, to learn about “the particle nature of matter”.  So we went around the house trying to find the smallest bit of matter we could find.  It was fun trying to separate water into “the smallest drop” and then seeing it flow back into a larger blob.  Then we (safely) hammered rocks into smaller pieces, and talked about how those little pieces could become a larger rock again, given enough pressure and heat “like in a volcano” (his words).  We finally got down to the idea of atoms as the smallest thing, which I explained to him.  We reviewed how all matter takes up space and weighs something.  I asked if he could think of something in the world that doesn’t take up space or weigh anything, and he had the gall to say “sunlight”!  I’m not ready to explain photons to him!  But it was a brilliant thought, and I told him we’d come back to it later.

It wasn’t in the lesson plan, but we decided to draw pictures of atoms, since Carbon is named for one.