When I first think back to my early
childhood school years, science isn’t something that comes to mind. I clearly remember some things from reading
and math, and of course, I remember the fun things like show and tell, field
trips, and making friends. The longer I spent trying to remember my science
experiences, the more I began to realize that science wasn’t exciting to me as
a child. The earliest experience I can remember is from probably 3rd
grade. Our teachers got together and had some people (at that age I thought
they were scientists, but thinking back, I’m not really sure who they were)
come into our school and give a performance to all the 3rd grade
classrooms. These “scientists” conducted tons of fun experiments for us to
watch and participate in. The one I most clearly remember is the “Elephant
Toothpaste” experiment.
I remember being amazed at how the “toothpaste” kept pouring
out of the bottle. Thinking further into my school years, all the science that
pops into my head are similar fun “experiments”. I remember making ice cream in 5th
or 6th grade, or creating egg cradles and dropping eggs from our
second story science classroom in 7th or 8th grade. Once
high school started, I remember science as more of a memorizing subject,
because we had to “learn” all sorts of things such as the elements and ions in
Chemistry or math equations and formulas for physics. I was pretty positive that I didn’t complete
much science outside of school, because I was raised in a family where neither
of my parents attended college. School wasn’t something that they were able to
help me with, and it wasn’t something that they really expanded on at home.
However, after I really thought about it, I guess I did enjoy some science
related things. For example, someone in my family was always cooking something,
and I was constantly begging my mom and grandma to let me help them cook. I
loved measuring out ingredients and stirring things together until they
combined into one. I guess at the time, I wasn’t even aware that I was doing
“science like” things, because it was always fun and something I loved to do.
After
thinking about my experiences and background, it lets me reflect on the way I
want to teach science to my students. The things I remember from my school
years were the activities that were either hands on or meaningful to me.
Therefore, I want to teach my children science through hands on activities when
appropriate. I want my students to be engaged in what their learning, and I
feel that when students are active or participating in lessons, they are
engaged as well. Second, I want my
students learning in science to be meaningful to them. I want them to enjoy it
and want to learn about it because it’s something they care about. I want
science to be more of an investigation of whatever interests them rather than
simply memorizing things. I also want to
include a section in my newsletters relating to science, so parents are able to
see what their students are learning about. I plan on making tons of resources
available to my students families, incase they want to expand on things we
discuss at school. I think it’s important for students to realize that science
really is all around them all the time, and it’s not something that just
happens at school. I want students to be able to see connections between things
we learn at school and things they see at home. After my own experiences,
informing and educating parents is probably an important way to start these
connections.
