It has taken me a while to figure out Rugrat's Science this year. I really wanted to like the Masterbooks science courses but she just didn't seem to gel with them. We tried the weather course last year and gave it up pretty quickly for a more put-it-together-as-I-go kind of thing. I just thought she isn't quite mature enough for this right now and put it aside for another year.
This year we started off with the Physical World science course. That wasn't going so well but she was getting some of it. Then I found out that it is considered the most advanced of these courses. Oops.
I decided to order Chemistry and Ecology as it had really good reviews. It is much more suited to her, however, it still seems a little advanced for her. So things still weren't working well.
Then I realized that, this year, I had come to dread science. It was the lesson I hated getting to every day. In one fell swoop, I had gone from looking forward to our science lesson that day to dreading it. That wasn't going to work at all for me. But, I also wasn't going to spend any more money on science curriculum. Grrr.
Well, it finally hit me, really hit me, what to do. They say on several homeschool sites all the time: The curriculum works for you. You don't work for the curriculum.
Science this year will just have to be the curriculum I manipulate for her.
I know that she is a visual learner so the first thing I started doing was finding, if at all possible, a video for her to watch that explained what was in each lesson. One of the things that we like about Masterbooks is that the lessons tend to be short and to the point. While that may not have been working in the text, it sure helped with finding videos.
Of course, to know for certain that the video was teaching the lesson components, I had to make myself pre-read the lesson. That was really the last thing I wanted to do at the end of a long day schooling her, preparing the next day's work, and hurrying to get ready so I could go fix dinner. Again, thankful for short lessons.
And then I really needed to make the effort to do experiments. I think that is what cements it in her brain. But I just didn't really like a lot of the experiments they had so far. Of course, in the first book this year, they were primarily intended for older kids so that might have had something to do with it. We are having more fun with some of the ones in the new book.
Like this one on the conservation of mass.
And it finally hit me again that we could just substitute more interesting experiments when we didn't like the one in the book. Like this one for learning about density.
Boom! Science is turning into fun again. Which means she'll learn (me too) and we have more pleasant days. I guess that's worth an extra 5 or 10 minutes of prep. :)
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