by Barbara Whitlock

Created on: July 03, 2009   Last Updated: July 15, 2009

About 2.5 million homeschoolers spend over 3 billion annually on homeschool resources. Science resources come in every shape and size. This article traces the best resources for a variety of homeschooling approaches, with a developmental orientation. If you follow this plan your children will have a rich science education with costs delayed to middle and high school.

Nature-oriented study

Learning about the natural world inductively, before introducing deductive scientific principles, is generally recognized as a best-first approach to science. Explore bugs in your back yard with a magnifying class. Keep track of the seasons by creating seasonal displays of flowers, branches, abandoned bird nests, animal skulls, etc. Keep a nature journal and have your children draw what they discover in your yard or in nearby habitats. You can enhance their learning by looking up, identifying and classifying their nature discoveries.

If they find a dead frog, open it up and explore its entrails. Take apart flowers and dissect the ovary. Look at pollen under a microscope (or magnifying glass). Have them taste the nectar insects suck up with probiscuses. Track animal footprints and scat. Rip into different types of cones to compare how various conifer plants reproduce. Take apart abandoned paper wasp nests. The possibilities are endless.

Also encourage your children's natural love of play. Have them become a bee working on a hive, making and nurturing their young. Pretend they are flowers, and show where they make the seeds. Others can be agents for dispersing their seeds. Turn on a fan for the wind. Take a small child and hold them up so they "land" on the older child and pollen sticks to their feet and hands. They can carry the pollen and deposit it on another "flower."

Nature offers a bounty for science study. It's ever-present and costs nothing. Use library books and Internet searches to model the scientific process of naming, indentifying and classifying objects - if they are interest; if not, do it quietly as something to show them. Look back on the same plants or areas through the seasons to get the broadest perspective.

Formal science study

Sciene is usually not the highest priority among most elementary-aged homeschoolers who are working hard to master basic skills and read expansively. But most children will tell you they enjoy science most. It's what you can DO that makes science so exciting. Plus, it helps kids understand the world they live in. Why does the

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