So a while back I posted a big announcement. Julie Leung left a comment about a demo that her husband had seen at a conference. The demo had to do with purifying, really just precipitating, DNA using some chemicals that you could find around your house. I had to learn a similar procedure back in college and used it a few times when was performing some cellular experiements. We were transforming some cells and seeing if we could detect the results using capillary electrophoresis (yeah, I know. My fingers get tired just typing it out).
So her comment got me to thinking; which is never a good thing.
How can I get my new little one interested and educated in the sciences. At least to the level that s/he will be able to call “bullshit” if someone tells her to wear a special magnetic herbal necklace to cure her heartburn. I don’t want to influence my childs decision of what to do with their life, but I do want to make sure that they have the intellectual tools to make the decision easier. Critical thinking, a reasonable knowledge of how the world works and why things work the way they do. In my experience, people are only interested in the answers if they are the ones asking the questions. How to set up the situations so they can learn without turning it into school at home.
Well, amazingly enough chemistry and genetics I think will be pretty easy. Kim loves working in the garden. So it should be easy to set up some Mendelian experiments. “Say little it, what color do you think the flowers would be if we put the white flowers next to the red flowers?”. Chemistry. Well cooking is just tasty chemistry. Adding tomatoes to a dish could bring about an acid/base discussion. There’s always the fun of adding vinegar to baking soda. Kids love stuff that bubbles up. Pop rocks are a great lead in to gasses and a burping contest followed by questions about where the burps come from is fun.
I’ll have to think about this some more.
Comment (1)
I think the best way for kids to learn is for parents to share lots of stuff that excites them (the parents). So your ideas sound like good ones to me! Another thing I think was important to our two (now grown-up) science-loving daughters was being able to explore stuff in nature on their own, being curious about fungi or fish or whatever and then having us get excited by their excitement and help them explore further. Oh, we had fun talking about math–stuff like “I’m going to make half this recipe, so how much flour..?” or “Why is a 9-inch round pan like an 8-inch square pan?”