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 bread rise? What makes baking soda turn into volcanic lava? So many exciting adventures.
When purchasing science curriculum you have two broad approaches: Random hands-on exploration and textbook study.
Hands-on curriculum
There are many books that encourage science experiments. They tend to be random clusters of cool and gooey things one can do. They do not focus on the discursive theories and definition that characterize scientific disciplines. Many homeschoolers say this is the best kind of learning - hands on, gooey, impressionable. Others say it's messy, time-consuming and the learning value is harder to identify.
Playing around with kitchen science and other experiments that rely on easy-to-find or purchase items are great ways to initiate scientific thinking and awareness. Do experiements. Anticipate results. Work on sequencing and abstraction skills. The experimental process teaches the scientific method inductively. If you have time and make even just a weekly commitment to these experiments your children will love you for it and learn abundantly.
You can find scores of enticing books to buy or borrow from the library, but here's a handy resource that is free. Sign up for the Happy Scientist newsletter ,and Robert Kampf will send you a weekly experiment you can do with things around your house. That's simple, easy, free and provides a weekly reminder.
If you want to invest in a bit more time and focus your hands-on science- learning on structured curricula that take you through many aspects of a scientific topic, try Tops Science Kits. Each topic-oriented instruction booklet is relatively inexpensive. Materials can be found readily. It does take time to put these together, but they are top-rate.
Textbook learning
As your children move toward middle and high school ages it is valuable to use textbooks, but they don't have to be dry and boring. Young children do not really need this level of instruction, though many enjoy science this way. A Beka is a well-known homeschool curriculum to protestant Christian homeschoolers. While they emphasize a creationist-orientation, their early books are thoughtfully laid out. Better yet are the A Beka science kits which you can purchase. These include all the materials you would need to use for a year's science experiments that complement the text. Son Light Science Curriculum also provides all the scientific materials you'd need for an entire year, although they do not favor single textbooks, but rely on a variety of resources with a heavy emphasis on Usborne books.
If you are looking for an all-in-one, comprehensive science textbook, avoid textbooks that dabble in all kinds of different sciences throughout a year. Concepts and Challenges is a textbook that moves from electricity to Physics to Chemistry. This kind of dabbling across scientific disciplines without unifying themes is less effective than textbooks that focus on one discipline per year.
The best all-in-one textbooks, which focus on single scientific disciplines per year, is Real Science for Kids. They offer each discipline in a variety of grade levels, providing flexibility to find a best fit for your child. The textbooks are thin and meaty, while attractively presented. You can go through one textbook at a very leisurely pace for a year, while complementing with other library enrichment books, or you can speed forward and cover two textbooks in one year. Labs are worked into each chapter, and all rely on very simple ingredients. A workbook of sources is included, so you can do review sheets and follow lab experiement report-like formats.
Science provides endless fodder for homeschool fun. Start with nature, dabble in experimentation, and then consider textbook-style learning as your children advance to middle and high school. Don't skip the labs, no matter what you do, because that's where the true learning becomes grounded.