Science lessons ramp up even more in middle school, and we’ll explain exactly what to teach and how lessons work at this stage as students deepen their knowledge of the universe and thus care more deeply about the world around them.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule
Winners in Life’s Race by Buckley (Yesterday’s Classics) (Living Book Press)
Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Form 3-4 Science Curriculum
Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Special Studies book lists
(This is a treasure trove! Use the left hand side bar to navigate down)
Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Living Science book lists
Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s details on List Keeping
Sabbath Mood Homeschool’s Calendar of Firsts
Handbook of Nature Study by Comstock
Emily’s favorite Science Notebook: Stillman & Birn Epsilon softcover 8×10
Nicole’s favorite notebook for keeping Lists: Blueline business notebook
Nature Notebooks:
- Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover 8×10 (Emily’s favorite!)
- Stillman & Birn Epsilon hardcover 5.5×8.5 (Nicole’s favorite!)
Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…
Liz
…Liz Cottrill…
Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.
Emily
Because Charlotte Mason designed her curriculum to meet children where they are at and then pull them up little by little, the further we go into a subject, the more is required of each child.
So Form 3, or what we would say grades are year seven and eight, children between 12 and 14. That’s another step up from Form 2. So Nicole, will you share the details about Science education at this level? And I know it’s gonna be a lot more than the last time.
Nicole
Yep.
And so in Forms 3 and 4, which I’m gonna explain in just a minute, but the first thing I wanted to highlight is the sheer variety of Science that they do at this level.
Students take up all the major branches: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and the Earth Sciences, and within them they meet a wide range of topics. So often in high school, the subjects get narrowed down to just very specific things for the sake of a transcript for the most part. But at these form levels, kids are still getting very broad exposure to several scientific fields. And the breadth is just one of the big gifts at this stage, I think.
So it’s worth pausing on what Forms 3 and 4 mean here and why we’re talking about them. Form 3 spans grades seven and eight, and Form 4 is grade nine, and that is how Charlotte Mason combined these things. She assigned the same work in Science, Natural History, to both of these forms for the most part. There’s a few little places where she branches off.
Nowadays, most high schools start in ninth grade, and so typically we will separate Form 3 from high school. But I just thought it’s good for you to know that the caliber of work that they are doing at this point is appropriate in Form 3 is appropriate. It’s appropriate for that student who’s come up in the Charlotte Mason education, but it’s also…the Form 3 work is often appropriate towards high school credit. So just know that.
So as for organizing all this, there’s more than one good way to do this. Charlotte Mason on her programmes, she had students studying several streams of Science at the same time, working on a different subject every day of the week, or in her case, most days of the week. Let me just clarify that. That is still one good option, and you’re welcome to follow it.
The option I usually point families to though is to concentrate on a more term by term schedule like they did in Form 2, like how we explained there. So I keep Biology going all year, one day a week, and then give your attention to just one other Science topic for the other days of the week.
Emily
I’m thinking if you don’t do this, if you did the one day per and you do four Sciences across the year, one week of like every three weeks is going to be experiments. And so if experiments cause fear and trepidation in your life or just…maybe that’s easier. Maybe you’re like, this is the week we do it and we get all of our supplies. Yeah. Wow. That would be a challenge.
Nicole
It is. And you know, as my girls, they were my last two that I homeschooled, got towards the end of high school, I asked them, What do you think? What would you prefer to do? Would you like to do a different stream every day of the week or keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it? Which is Biology all year and then we change topics term by term. And they chose to do something different every day of the week.
Emily
Okay.
Nicole
And we did run into that where we had three, four experiments in one week.
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
But at that point, they’re more independent and they could take that on. I was more just getting them the experiment supplies. So my point really is that either way is fine. I think that if you’re new to this, it’s probably better to do the term by term approach because switching subjects
has value in it. It’s what Charlotte Mason had us do in many categories.
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
But if you’re brand new to it, it can be a lot. So anyways, that’s what I suggest.
Now there’s one place that I make a real change from what Miss Mason assigned. And that is that in Forms 3 and 4, she kept her students in a Nature Lore reader, again a Buckley book, this time Winners in Life’s Race. And this time we have the vertebrates. So in Form 2, she had the invertebrates, and Form 3 and 4 she had the vertebrates in that book.
Now I love Buckley and I will just champion for her in the earlier forms all day long. But I think that at this stage the children need to really get started on a more formal Biology. We are very deliberate about our Nature Study. I feel like we’re just as deliberate as we could be, and a lot of what is covered in those books that Buckley was presenting to the kids, we’re covering that, but we need to get started on Biology. That is, I would say, the one topic where there is so much more quantity of information for our kids to learn.
Liz
Today, you mean.
Nicole
Today. Compared to–
Emily
And things that they actually have a relationship with so they can take that on earlier like in high school instead of waiting until college.
Nicole
And living books to work with, because you know we see a lot of evidence of Charlotte Mason choosing books because they’re good living books even in her day that were like fifty years old. We see that it was important to her to have that good living book but we have some good living books we can work with. So I think that is very important.
Let’s see, there’s just more information. The Special Studies, like I said, they do a lot of filling that plant and animal side of Biology right alongside the reading. As in Form 2, a Science biography makes a wonderful free read during these years. And now that the students are taking up Biology and other branches, it’s a good time to let them see that every one of these fields was built by real people who were curious enough to just keep asking questions. It’s a really good thing.
Nature Study also matures at this time. And now our students are looking at things that are more cross-species, pollination, a seed dispersal, things that are not just a single plant or a single species, but more like big picture.
Emily
Processes and such.
Nicole
Yeah, I mean this is really important. And it will lead really nicely to what comes next. And that’s what we’re seeing all the way through here is everything is developmentally building up to more.
This is also where the Science Notebook begins. So before now, you mentioned in our last episode that in their narrations, they could keep a little notebook where just their Science narrations lived, but they didn’t really have to do that at that point. They could do written narrations just with all their other narrations. But now we want them to have a Science Notebook that all of the subjects live in. They can put experiments in there, diagrams that maybe are in the book that they’re reproducing over. So it really becomes a beautiful book. It’s not divided by sections or like divided by topics. You wouldn’t like divide up this is the Biology section, Chemistry…. Just if you’re doing all those subjects, you turn the page and add the next thing.
Also the Nature Notebook increases here too because they start keeping more formal lists at this age. And this is truly a challenge. It’s exciting, but it’s not easy. But at this point, they’re keeping like flowers and bird lists, they’re identifying them, they are putting their scientific name and their basic classification and stuff like that. So see, really ramping up now.
And one more addition to this level, beginning in Form 3 and continuing right through the upper forms, students start reading current events in Science. And so through the living books, they aren’t only learning facts, they’re really learning to think. And this subject is huge for this. And then when they’re reading the scientific thought that’s changed over the years and how those ideas have been proposed and tested and sometimes overturned, they gain perspective to look at today’s headlines with a more critical, thoughtful eye. And that’s exactly the scientific literacy that we’re aiming at, for the young person who can read a piece of Science news and ask sensible questions about it and just really be learning to think about things.
Emily
Yeah, so it is a lot more, and the time is a lot more too. So for the lesson format, we have four lessons a week and they’re all 40 minutes. So we had a total of 70 minutes in Form 2. So now we have 160 minutes.
Liz
More than double.
Emily
More than double the amount of Science. And so, like you said, you do not recommend any more Nature Lore because they’re going to be starting actual Biology, but they’re getting Nature Lore as they read about their Special Studies, too. But that becomes more for leisure time. They have to pursue that outside of lessons.
As Nicole was describing the streams of Science, the big idea, as she said, was to keep variety in each term and across the year. And to do that, while she mentioned talking about or keeping the focus on one Science topic, there is one of those four days that is one stream all the way through. So for example, one day of Biology all year long. The next year you might do a day of Botany all year long. And then at the same time they’re going to have one Term Science for the other three days.
The format is still the same though. So while the content is ramping up, we’re not learning new procedures, right? They’re recalling the last lesson, they’re reading and narrating and then writing it in their Science notebook. Probably their narration is going in there and diagrams, as you said. And then keeping those lists.
So our teacher prep at this age, again, Nicole’s guides make it just so easy. You’ve got it laid out every day of the week. And if you wanted to do one day per or one day for one and three days for the other, the way you have it laid out, it’s very easy to do that. So that means they’re gonna be reading more days and one day for experiments every third lesson.
Nicole
Generally, yeah.
Emily
Generally, yes. So I think as far as teacher prep goes, having the supplies on hand is essential. I showed this for my Form 2 students, but I have these Science bins and I share them with my Natural History club. They also help share the expense of buying some of the Science materials. but I keep them in a Science bin and we just rotate around so we can share materials and the non-consumables, or maybe you might consume a little bit but you have enough for many many students to use.
So I find that helpful to put pull those ahead of time either at the beginning of the term, or I try to prep those all in the summer so I have most of the things and then I set myself reminders in my phone of if those other random things that I might need to get that are fresh or going to expire or just don’t live in the bins.
And again still at this age you would prep an object lesson as a teacher. So you are helping your child look more deeply at something. And because we’re looking at processes, you might have to be a little more creative. But also you can, I’m taking your idea about your video object lessons. You could find a video online and do an object lesson from something that you can’t necessarily count on observing outside so that you’re prepared for when you do come across that or evidence of it. Migration. We can’t really do an object lesson on migration, but we could absolutely watch like the paths of birds or or what it looks like for them when they all are flying overhead or whatever. But we can’t do an object lesson out in our backyard on migration.
Nicole
Right.
Emily
Necessarily. But then someday we might see a flock going over and we’re prepared for it.
Nicole
Right.
Emily
And then I also, because lessons at this age are independent for the most part and you write your guide to the student now, so they are responsible for reading through the lesson setup and all of that, I do pre-read the books that they’re going to be reading so that I can have an understanding sympathy as Charlotte Mason would call it. So I consider that part of my teacher prep as well.
So resources to mention. Again, Nicole’s guides go with a living book. So it takes a living Science book and then adds experiments to it. You also bring things up to date that might need it if the book is a little older as a lot of living books are and all of that is in here but as I said is the Form 3-4 guides are now written to the student.
So there’s Chemistry, Astronomy, that’s with another book. Oh, and on your website you have lists of lots of books on the topics for the Special Studies levels and all that. And we will link to those in the show notes.
Science notebooks. I got one that is the same size as our nature notebook for my son. The paper is a little thicker, which allows him to do, I don’t know, just some more drawing diagrams and things. So it’s the same size. And it’s again Stillman and Birn, so the paper is high quality. The bindings are sewn so they’re gonna lay flat. And this is a soft cover book, but it’s in the Epsilon series if you’re interested in just what I did, but that’s not a prerequisite. You can get whatever you think, but something that works well for writing and for drawing.
The Book of Lists. This is a notebook that we will throw a link to in the show notes, but it is full of graph paper. And so these are your…here’s your bird list. You have one for birds in California and California flowers, and then you have Tennessee flowers and Tennessee birds. And so you’re going to write the name and the Latin name and the family they belong to, where you saw them, and then at the end, that’s why the grids are so handy, is you’re supposed to include what date you first saw it and then check off subsequent months that you saw the bird so you really can track…or flowers, when they’re blooming, where you saw them, so you get used to knowing more about their habits.
Nature notebooks again. Stillman and Birn is what Nicole and I both use. I use the soft cover 8×10 alpha series for all of my kiddos. Nicole prefers the Epsilon series hardcover, about 5×8 inches, and they are just wonderful and will last a lifetime.
The Handbook of Nature Study can still help you at this level for object lessons and for your own nature knowledge and things that your children might need to know.
The Calendar of Firsts. This can be an ongoing project, but the lists really start to take the place of the Calendar of Firsts at this level.
Nicole
I agree. That might be a good family thing.
Emily
Yes.
Nicole
And then you know, maybe there’s younger students that are keeping that up, but yeah.
Emily
And they just might like to if you’ve been doing this for a lot of years they might want to keep adding to it, but I think it’s a good adjunct to the lists or it helps set up their keeping the lists and should excite their interest in doing that project as well.
Nicole
Yes.
Emily
Well what challenges or common questions do you hear at this level?
Liz
I think at this level the biggest problem most parents face is it just seems like too much work. Doing more than one stream at a time, they feel like their kids will be confused or they won’t be able to keep up, and the difficulty of getting around to all those experiments.
And I would say, you know, preparation ahead of time is key with the experiments. In your breaks in the summer or between terms, that’s the time to get everything pulled together. And you can at this age have your students, this could be an assignment, you know, you need to collect all these things and make lists of things we need to purchase.
I would say that in our world Science is necessary, it is super important, it is part of our daily way of life. And it’s a big part of the feast, which reflects that Charlotte Mason had that same value of the subjects. The students are independent at this stage. They can read. Nicole’s guides are written to the student. And like I said, they can organize the materials. And they’ll get much more out of their Science the more they own it. And I would just say to the parent, don’t feel burdened about this. Your child needs to be carrying more of the weight at this point. They are beginning to learn how to collect and report data and do serious experimentation and follow directions, read and narrate more in depth.
And it is important I think to do the multiple streams because atoms, you know, they’re part of Biology and Physics and Chemistry. You know that these Sciences are not distinct subjects. They overlap.
Emily
That’s why we have Biochemistry or Chemical Engineering.
Liz
And I’ve read many recent scientific books that are bemoaning the fact that our specialization has limited our knowledge, that we would actually be able to give more application if we understood more about the other fields. But, you know, none of us can be master of any one area. The amount of information that’s out available in the world right now is…did they say it is doubling every 24 hours?
Emily
Something like that.
Liz
Yeah.
Emily
But so the key takeaway is now is not the time for specialization. Right? That would be grad school, probably.
Nicole
Yeah. But I’m also thinking in response to that question, that this is why we’re always harping on the schedule. Because yes, it does ramp up. And if we have early on established the habits of following a schedule—
Liz
…and paying attention for the whole lesson.
Nicole
Right, we’re going to be prepared to handle this kind of information. And you know, our students are going to be and we’re going to be.
Emily
And students are not confused by doing multiple streams.
Liz
No, in fact if anything like she said, it builds interest. A change is as good as a break.
Emily
Thank you for joining us today. Next time we’ll look at the highest level of lessons for students in Forms 5-6. We’ll see you next time.