School Science is like a Box of Chocolates

School science is like a box of chocolates: tricky to get into, but a lot of fun when you finally crack it open. 

So if you belong to the growing club of Parents Against Science Homework (PASH), if you panic at the thought of water molecules and red-ox reactions (reduction-oxidation reactions), here are your life-savers:

• Can you hammer in a nail using a banana? (Sure you can. If you freeze the banana)
• Magic Milk
• The Egg Float experiment
• Make a kite that can fly
• Blue Goo

If that doesn't help, take heart. School children in France already have a website where, for a few Euro, they can purchase read-made maths homework. Sooner or later, somebody will spot the niche for science, too. ;-)

Maths - Just A Memory Game?

How are your children being taught the fundamentals of Maths? Do you know? Or is it all a bit of mystery, a secret carefully guarded by the teachers? 

At my school - and it is a fabulous school in almost every respect - we don’t have textbooks for our 5-9 year olds and maths workbooks remain in class (there is no maths homework), so I actually have no clue whether they are learning addition or fractions. 

When I ask my daughter what they did in Maths today, I inevitably hear:

• “Um... nothing?”
• “I can’t remember.”
• “What’s for afternoon tea?”
• “Well, Jessica said that I could borrow her pencil but then Katie, that’s Katie S not Katie M, said hers was better than Jessica’s, so we spent the rest of the lesson comparing the pencils...” (!!!!!!!!!!!)
• “We did these squares. You write a number on top. Then you skip a line. Then there are some other numbers already filled in, and then you fill in some other numbers, but I don’t know how.” (?????????)

 

When I ask the teacher how I can support her in teaching maths to my child, I hear:

• “She’s doing well. You have nothing to worry about.”

And when I insist:

• “Play board games and card games with her. Make maths fun. Make sure she really knows the answers without having to work them out.”

 

That really bothers me. Why should a child memorise answers to sums? Maths is all about comprehension. What’s the point of being able to recite like a parrot that 15+15=30 and 15+16=31 and 15+17=32? I would prefer my daughter to be able to work out 15+16 in three different ways, taking her sweet time to arrive at the answer. 

What do you think? 

PS: Some great links for this discussion:

• Math Flash Card Builder
• Check out what other parents say about Math
• Your child’s learning style (my daughter is highly visual and the auditory way of learning maths at school doesn’t suit her natural ability)

What educational computer games can you recommend?

Commercial computer games

My 6-year old daughter loves “Aladdin’s Maths Quest” (Disney). It features visual-spatial puzzles, basic addition, and problem solving such as: if I have 8 crystals, and half of them are green, and two are white, and the rest are red.... A year ago, she refused to do the problem unless I changed the crystals into lollies, because that’s what she could relate to.

My 4-year old son prefers Bob the Builder games of the “fix the leaky pipe” sort: diagnose the fault, find the right tool and the right parts, fiddle with all the bits. You know, boy stuff.

They both love “Learn the Language” games from New Concepts (the games are aimed at adults, but my kids love them, and their Polish vocabulary is impressive as the result).

Free online games

My friends swear by the following for 7+ year olds:

• http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/games.aspx (general science)
• http://www.kidspot.com.au/SpellingGames/wordscrambler-index-kidspot.asp (spelling)
• http://www.coolmath4kids.com/ (maths)
• http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/Geography.htm (geography of the world)
• http://ababasoft.com/kids/index_logic.html (logic games)

What are some of your favourites?

Please leave a comment on this blog to tell us what your children enjoy playing on the computer.

 

Kids and the Internet

Of course, we could go into the debate of whether it’s better to kick a soccer ball around or to click the mouse, how much screen time is too much, and so on. We won’t. Some basic things to keep in mind, though:

• Teach your kids to be Internet-savvy
• Read articles about Internet safety for kids
• Assess how safe your child is on the Internet
• Consider using the Net Nanny
• Don't wrap them in cotton wool: they have to brave the cyber jungle, sooner or later....