Utilizing the Scientific Method in Your Home School
By Mimi Rothschild
The scientific method isn’t just for scientists or science class, it can be a great tool to utilize in all course areas of your home school curriculum. The root word for science is the Latin word scire, meaning to know, which is the entire point of home school. Not just to know chemistry or biology, or physics, but to know everything. Indeed, utilizing the scientific method in all your home school curriculum content areas will help your child to learn.
All of us non-scientists may have vague memories about the scientific method from science fairs or courses in high school or college, but the scientific method isn’t nearly as obscure as all that. Indeed, you probably use the scientific method every day, in your home school and outside of it, to solve even the most mundane problems. Say, for example, that you sit down at your computer and try to turn it on and nothing happens. You might be puzzled, asking yourself why your computer isn’t working when it was just fine yesterday. You check all the cables; check that it is plugged and that the surge protector is turned to the right position. Without even realizing it, you were just following the scientific method to solve a problem. Despite the fact that problems are different, the problems and questions that your child runs into in your home school curriculum probably won’t have much to do with turning on the computer, the method itself works in a variety of situations and leads your child to discovery, not just learning, in his home school work.
The first step in the scientific method is to identify the problem. Your home school curriculum will provide you with plenty of problems and questions to pose to your child. The problem can be turning the computer on, solving an algebra equation, or figuring out the causes of World War I. In all these cases, you do research, make observations, ask questions, guess at what the problem is, and then experimenting to find a conclusion. Even though the topics are all very different, it is the same process of discovery for each problem.
This method of learning has another benefit for your home school child. Instead of simply telling him what the historically accepted causes of World War I were, your child actually discovers them for himself through the problems presented in his home school curriculum. It is likely that he, if he does his work properly, will end up at the same conclusions that professional historians have come up with, but instead of learning what others say, he will have discovered the answer on his own. This discovery not only teaches him research and critical thinking skills, but it will also impart a deeper knowledge of the subject than most of his peers in traditional school will have.