Weird things can happen when you bring your kids to browse at the Educational Resource Center.
My daughter has always been interested in biology, so it’s no surprise when she picks up a biology-related activity. But my son, although he loves nature, gravitates toward the cold-blooded sciences when given his choice: computers, physics, computers, books, computers…
So a few weeks ago, we were in the ERC and he reached up to the top shelf in the science section and came down with… a dissection kit. His eyes lit up. “Can I get this?” he asked. “Do you really want to dissect a dead animal?” I asked with suspicion. “Yes!!” he answered enthusiastically.
Not one to pigeonhole my kids, I agreed. I have no idea where it comes from, because he’s the sort who gets teary-eyed when his matter-of-fact six-year-old sister says something like, “When Nisene and Maxine die, what kind of cat should we get next?”
We got home with the kit and he immediately wanted to go on the Nasco site to order some frogs. We were sitting in my office, and I was working, and he was growing more and more excited. Worms! Frogs! Kittens!
Well, OK, maybe not kittens. That’s a little too close to home.
But he grew increasingly excited as he navigated through the makings of a home laboratory. Forceps, scalpels, pins, baby pigs, rattlesnake heads, a Bony Fish Raised Relief Poster.
“Mommy?” he said, knowing that I was working and he was risking a grumpy reply. “If I did homeschool, could we do all these things?”
If you aren’t a habitue of my blog, you don’t know that my son loves his school, and so does my daughter. But she’s the homeschooled one. He’s the one who, last year when I casually mentioned homeschooling him, got a scared look on his face and said, “When would I see my friends?” He loves his school, and for the first time he has buddies in his class that share interests with him. This is a huge deal, especially for me. I know how lonely it is the be the weird kid, even if other kids are nice to you. At his school, my son is the leader of a group of kids who have joined together to create a kid-based programming environment. It’s as cool as homeschooling, but he goes off on a bus every day, so I can focus on our daughter’s rather more unusual needs.
So his question was loaded with all sorts of history and emotion, and I tried to answer neutrally. “We can do that stuff whether or not you’re in homeschool,” I pointed out. “And I bet your school will start doing more interesting science stuff when you’re in middle school.”
It’s a major failing of our educational system, at least as far as my kids are concerned, that science isn’t really pursued in any depth till kids have passed through the wonder stage and onto the “do I really have to do this?” stage.
To cut to the chase the frogs, highly anticipated, arrived. It turned out that neither of the kids was really dextrous enough to do the cutting, so I had to do it. Once we identified the major organs and decided that she was probably a girl, I let them have at it. A visual:
They had a fabulous time! They were so fascinated by what was inside the frog, and they took a number of samples to look at under the microscope. It was hardly “real” science — we lost steam in doing diagrams pretty much immediately — but it totally fired up their imaginations.
That evening, it was my son’s turn to make dinner, something we’ve just started this summer. Each kid gets to plan a meal, help me shop for it, and make it (with my help). My daughter was clearly jealous. She wanted to cook, even though she knew it would be her turn the next evening. She asked if she could make something, and I could see that she just needed to do something. So she decided to make “medicine cookies.” She made a batter loaded up with turmeric, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and coriander.
I had to channel Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing! Nothing!” I didn’t say a word. She made her cookies and they were lovely:
Alas, when she tasted them, they lived up to their name. Her valiant father arrived home and was willing to take a nibble, and he asked her what she thought. “Yech!” she said. They were pretty, though.
My son’s stir-fry was equally successful in the personal accomplishment sense, but luckily didn’t resemble medicine one bit. We ate, and yet another day of froggy inspiration came to a close.
