If you’ve been following along with our series on Charlotte Mason Science lessons, you likely have some lingering questions. We’ll address many common queries that we hear from parents and teachers about Science and Nature Study on the podcast today.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Season 12 Reading Schedule
Sabbath Mood Homeschool (SMH) Science Curriculum
- Lower Elementary (Form 1) Nature Study Scope & Sequence
- Upper Elementary (Form 2) Science Curriculum Guides
- Middle School (Form 3-4) Science Curriculum Guides
- High School (Form 5-6) Science Curriculum Guides
SMH Special Studies Guides
- Nature Explorers (Rotation A) (Rotation B)
- Understanding Biomes (Rotation A) (Rotation B)
The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen
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…
Nicole
…Nicole Williams…
Liz
…and Liz Cottrill.
Emily
And this is our final episode in our Science series. We have covered a lot of ground. In these series wrap-ups, we like to address any lingering practical considerations and questions and also anything that we might need to discuss when we have children in multiple forms. We like to talk about those overarching ideas or practical application questions.
So Nicole, can you tell us…probably the question we most want or our listeners most want to know is how and where and if we can combine kids in different levels. At what point can we combine them?
Nicole
Yeah.
So Science is a subject where we can combine students in some places and in others we really should not.
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
And the deciding factor is always the type of work and the amount of time the form requires. If you’re following along you saw that there were some very big jumps that happen from form to form sometimes.
Emily
Yeah.
Nicole
Within any single form students can combine without any trouble and, in the upper Forms they combine well across Forms like the high schoolers in Forms 4, 5, and 6, so your ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders, those can be combined and work together and and you can really have that younger high schooler jump in wherever the older high schooler is. And that’s the same in all of the forms, just having your younger child jump in wherever your older child is within that form level.
Liz
So, are you saying if a child came in in ninth grade and the 11th grader was doing Chemistry 3, that the ninth grader would also do Chemistry 3?
Nicole
You know, I really think there is so much benefit to that. I know that that seems kind of crazy…
Liz
Yeah, because we don’t like doing things out of order.
Nicole
We don’t, and we still…Charlotte Mason did this over and over. There was never a time she didn’t. And sure, that younger student maybe won’t get as much out of that part 3 than they would have if they had done it later when they’re older. But they’re gonna get more out of the first part than their older sibling did when they went through it.
Liz
So the benefits outweigh….
Nicole
Right. There’s just so many places in a Charlotte Mason education where one thing doesn’t necessarily have to come before another thing.
Emily
Right, and I think that’s the nature of the Living Books. And also really Science is not Math. It uses math sometimes, but it’s not like you have to learn this concept before this concept before this concept.
Nicole
Exactly. Right. For sure.
So Form 3 can even be combined with high school students sometimes.
Emily
Okay.
Nicole
This is especially when the older student is new to Charlotte Mason. So you have a new older student, they’re new to this, they can actually begin the core subjects with the Form 3 guide, and a lot of times I recommend that anyway. So students could be combined that way.
Emily
So you’re saying use the Form 3-4 guides for a new Form 4 student who’s not had all of those so far.
Nicole
And not necessarily all of them. They don’t need to do two years’ worth, but if they’re going to begin Biology, say, don’t start in the high school Biology, start with the Form 3 Biology and set that groundwork before moving forward.
Emily
Okay.
Nicole
Still only requires three to get a transcript credit so an older student doesn’t need to necessarily continue all the way through, but getting those early ones are good.
Emily
Okay.
Nicole
Okay, where we can’t combine is at the bottom. So Form 1 should not be joined with any other form. The work is a totally different kind of work. The timing is different and there is this practical danger too that if a young child moves ahead to Form 2 books you find yourself needing to hunt down other books, other experiments. You know, there’s a lot of work that you’re gonna have to do later on to fill that gap. And your student won’t have gotten that foundation, that I hope if you listen to this whole series, that foundation is vital. So they need to kind of live where they are there.
Likewise, Form 2 shouldn’t be pulled either down to Form 1 because you’re trying to do everybody together, or up to Form 3. The level and the time allowed, they just don’t line up in either direction. There’s just a real developmental process that’s happening with all these. The students need to stay in their spot.
Emily
And unfortunately, it’s the spots that everybody wants to combine because they do have these strong readers and it’s hard to get together, but it’s imperative.
Nicole
It is. And just one thing I would say to help yourself out with this is do be thinking in terms of your child moving towards being independent in their work. However that looks for that child, you know, you might need to do the reading early in Form 2, but maybe later in Form 2 they can do the reading by themselves. So there’s a transition in that Form 2 level typically. Work that, make sure you’re getting to the point where in Form 3 they can do the work independently of you, even if there are some workarounds that you have to do.
Emily
I was just thinking, like your oldest student is profoundly dyslexic and he never was able to be independent with his reading, but he was quite capable and needed, his mind needed, the ideas that were appropriate for his age and form.
Nicole
Right.
Emily
But you would read a lot of his books because you weren’t able to read them in real time to him, and he would have to listen to a voice memo.
Nicole
Right. And at the same time, he needed that independence. So I would either read early in the morning and record myself doing his reading for the day…but later and now there’s so much technology available.
Liz
Just with your phone, you can read anything.
Nicole
You can read anything. Yeah. And so I used to have to—
Emily
I just saw someone say it’s a great time to be a dyslexic!
Nicole
Totally. It is. PDFs can be read, the sections of PDFs, so they could read the beginning of the lesson. That’s kind of their setup. They can then read separately, this is what you need to read today. Take the phone over and read the book. You know, there is so much independence that can be worked in there for your older students.
So the principal is the same one that runs through this whole subject: combine where the content and the developmental stage naturally overlaps, but really protect that progression. And just remember that each stage is built on the stage before it, and the real value comes from letting the students meet these ideas at the right time and in the right way.
Emily
Yeah.
So kind of along with that, or tag teaming that idea, we always have the question of placement. Like my kid is new to Charlotte Mason, or new to maybe your Science curriculum or whatever. At what level do I place them?
And our answer is always the same. Charlotte Mason believed that except in Math and Grammar, they needed to go in at the level appropriate for their age. So if they are in the Form 2 ages, they start in Form 2 Science even if they don’t have the foundation of those other nature lores. Probably they’re encountering a lot of those ideas anyways and their minds are ready to pick that up or you can work on some of those things even in their Nature Study time.
So that would mean Form 1 students are six to nine year olds. The grades are years one through three. Form 2, nine to twelve year olds, grades four through six, that’s what you put them in. Form 3 is twelve to fourteen year olds, depending on when they come in. and that is grades seven through eight, and then Forms 4-6 is fourteen to eighteen year-olds. Years nine through twelve.
However, one thing Nicole did not get into is if your students are new to Charlotte Mason and they’re new to Nature Study, the area you can combine everybody is really at the Form 1 level of Special Studies. So your afternoon field work will be the same. You might even well, the older Forms won’t have the time in the morning to read the books, but you maybe could have them read the same ones that you’re reading with the younger kids. They’re just getting it more…they’ll speed through those because they’re usually much smaller and simpler. But that is a good thing to do.
So you would even recommend using your Nature Explorers guide all the way through high school if they’ve never done it, because it is the foundation for Nature Study, Biology. They need those broad categories and those big ideas.
Nicole
Right.
Liz
But the Science and labs you would need to do at their level.
Emily
And book reading, and even the Nature Lore, like Form 2 still has Nature Lore, but that should be a different caliber than their Form 1 Nature Lore.
So again, there is not any order to those Form 2 or really even Form 3 Sciences and then a lot of them are, like Chemistry 1-3, separate guides. Physics 1, 2, and 3…. But even with that, the order doesn’t exactly matter. Each term stands on its own, and so you do not need to think, well, they didn’t have what Nicole recommends for fourth grade, and they’re coming in as a fifth grader. Do I need to start there? You could, but it doesn’t matter. So you do need to put them in the right level, but the actual topics don’t matter, right?
Nicole
Right. One thing I suggest to people is if they are new to this and they’re just coming in right in the middle, pick a topic that your kid is most interested in or that you think will really light their fire. Because once they get a taste for this kind of a Science education, usually they’re just gonna take right off.
Emily
And again, Science is not like Math or Grammar. There is not one entry point, right? There are many, many entries into this world. And really, something they’re interested in, they probably already know a little something about. And so they have a relationship started with that and then can go deeper.
Nicole
Right.
Emily
Well, what other questions do we have hanging out here?
Liz
You know, I just would say overall just the typical parent insecurity, they feel inadequate to do a professional enough job of teaching such an important subject. And I would just say, even if you love Science and did a lot of Science, you think, well, in the 25, 35 years since I was in school, there’s so much more. You know. But to remember that the student is the learner.
And I recently read a book called The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen. And she talked about the serious disconnect with children now in the digital age, that they’re not getting enough hands-on experience with anything in life. And I just think that this Science will work against that problem. They’re doing a lot of personal investigation and Science is all about trial and error, and emphasis there on the error.
And I think we need to face our faulty thinking that knowledge is a sphere just for the professional. You know, that is totally antagonistic to Charlotte Mason’s principles and beliefs. We just need to get over our fear of that and jump in and start learning where we’re at and let the ideas seep into them and ignite their fire for Science.
Emily
One other thing that maybe kind of plays into that insecurity that we feel as teachers or our inadequacy to teach Science to our children is how do we know that they’re doing well or how do we assess their progress? What do you think, Nicole?
Nicole
Okay, well I’ll tell you that if you do use my Science guides, I do include an exam. So you would have that to work with, you don’t need to write the exam questions. But first I wanted to talk just a word about what kind of exam we would give for Science.
At the end of each term, you ask a set of Science or Nature Study questions to the child, one at a time within the normal lesson time. They are not multiple choice questions.
Emily
Right.
Nicole
They are not tests of their memorization either. They are essentially narrations. They’re open invitations to tell what they know, what they’ve noticed. So questions might be something like, what do you know of our sun and its atmosphere? Or describe two songbirds, saying what you’ve noticed yourself. Often a drawing is required in these, and you just think about, so that’s a drawing from memory of something that they’ve looked at well enough to be able to outline it and get it there on paper. Could be wild fruit, a twig, phases of the moon. There’s usually a choice of questions, so a child could choose what they feel strongest at answering.
Emily
Because exams are trying to give them a chance to show what they know.
Nicole
Exactly, right. So because the questions are open, there’s not really right or wrong answers, it’s just about the child telling what they remember.
So then the question becomes how do you evaluate them? And we do have some principles to look at. Relevance is one of them. Do the observations connect to what was actually studied that term?
Liz
Or does their answer answer the question that was asked.
Nicole
Yeah, that’s one lot of them. Detail, do they recall specific features, behaviors, or comparisons? Do the drawings show real attention? Was their personal engagement shown through these answers? Is there delight and curiosity, a sense of relationship with the subject? Their vocabulary is something Charlotte Mason always pointed to. What kind of words they used. Are they reaching for accurate descriptive language? She always talked about the names, them using names, and the same is true here.
And then maybe more primarily is growth over time. So look at this exam compared to last exam and see are you seeing some growth in the student? Fuller descriptions, yeah, progress, more careful drawings, things like that.
The last one really is the heart of it. We aren’t scoring memory, we’re watching for a person’s powers of observations to mature, and it just reminds me, Charlotte Mason said the function of education is not to give technical skill but to develop a person.
So we really…these exams are an opportunity for us to celebrate what they’ve noticed because noticing is really the foundation of scientific thinking, and I hope that you’re picking up on that kind of stuff, that you don’t have to know all the answers in order to score these tests. So while you said that part of your preparation is to pre-read these books – I think that’s wonderful. I don’t think it’s a hundred percent necessary.
Emily
No, I mean, I do not do that so I can gauge whether my child is doing a good narration. It’s so I can have an informed conversation with them.
Nicole
Exactly. And so don’t feel like, I don’t know the answers to this. But instead read your child’s exams as if they’re telling you something new and how much do they have to share with you on this exam.
Emily
That’s really good.
Did you have any closing thoughts you want to leave us with, Mom? Or is that it?
Liz
I think you guys have covered it.
Emily
Okay.
That brings us to the end of our series of episodes on Science lessons. Next, we’re turning our attention to the very Science-adjacent subject of Geography. So we’ll see you next time.