Some ideas for math and science education:
There's a children's microscope called a Geoscope that we've found very interesting. They run about $30, have pretty good optical quality and are unbreakable. Looking at common kitchen items (flour, salt, sugar, spices) and garden soil and so forth was a real eye opener.
We have an amateur astronomy club here in Santa Cruz county. Some of the members have built pretty sophisticated scopes and they love to share them. We hooked up with them during the Jupiter collisions. They had an informational slide show about the moon and patiently showed Morganne 4 of Jupiter's moons, pointing out the rings, explaining how the scopes worked, etc.
State parks often have guided tours and nature walks. Any decent bookstore will have a plethora of nature guides. We've visited the local parks, a bird sanctuary, tide pools, Long Marine Lab and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I'm also pretty adept at plant and animal identification. Morganne at 6 already can tell the difference between oaks, pines, redwoods, Douglas firs and madrones.
We found a rare Santa Cruz long-toed salamander in our bathroom about a month ago. We spent some time observing her before releasing her outdoors. We also do ongoing studies in spider identification; we have brown recluses and black widows on our property.
The Eyewitness books are good. Morganne especially likes the Eyewitness guide to the human body. We also have a plastic skeleton named Tony. There are lots of good anatomical models available. You can get eyes, ears, complete bodies, etc.
I really like manipulatives and games for teaching math. We have pattern blocks and Cuisenaire rods and the Miquon math books (my daughter has been known to cry when it gets too dark for her to see her math books). I also love the book Family Math by Stenmark, Thompson and Cossey (Lawrence Hall of Science; ISBN 0-912511-06-0).
There are games that are good for arithmetic practice, fractions, telling time and so forth. We are fortunate enough to be part of a homeschooling program that has a resource library well stocked with games. We can borrow them for a few weeks and then return them. Morganne really enjoys playing them.
She also received some flash cards for her birthday. I've always considered flash cards pretty useless, but Morganne begs me to help her with "just 3 more".
I think Family Math is a must-have for homeschoolers. Basically, though, Morganne enjoys the science books I purchase for myself more than the kid-oriented books. I have a full Audubon Bird Dictionary (about 1000 pages) and poring over that is a fun family activity.
Being a mathematician and a nerd, I find that it's hard to separate math out from daily life. So I don't try. We use math concepts hourly and talk our way through the little word problems that life presents us with. Also, it's just natural for us to talk about muscle groups, squabble over whether a given tern is a Forster's or Common, refer to plants by their names, talk about placental implantation when we're slicing peppers and give our children lots of descriptive terms about the universe.
Enjoy! The whole universe is our laboratory.
Copyright © 1996 by
Heather Madrone. All rights reserved.