Nature Study Lays the Foundation for Science

Form 1 science (grades 1-3) includes all nature study and no formal science. (e.g., chemistry or physics) That is hard for some people because they want to get to the “good stuff,” but it’s essential to understand that “out-of-door nature-study lays the foundation for science.” (3/281)

When Charlotte Mason talked about nature study, the terms she most often used were: out-of-door work, field studies, fieldwork, or field nature studies. Somehow, when she says it, it doesn’t sound like fluff or buying time before they can start REAL science classes.

Out-of-door work includes:

• Nature walks
• Keeping nature notebooks
• Reading natural history
• Doing special studies
• Parent-led object lessons

I discussed the first two items at the beginning of this series, and I will talk about the last three in the following articles, but first, let’s consider how nature study lays the foundation for science? And how are those habits carried over into the upper-level science classes? Please note that if you have children older than Form 1, it is still worth following along because all students should be doing nature study.

How Things Work
First, time spent in nature allows children to learn the necessary information about how things work. They learn about the laws of nature and the order of things through play and the study of nature. Essentially, they use all of their senses to learn about the natural world.

Unfortunately, without the foundation of nature study, later science classes become just a matter of mastering the subject through memorization but not through understanding. This idea is supported by the alarming trend university professors see in their students. For example, Richard Louv, the author of Last Child in the Woods, quoted a professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine to say:

Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump,‘because the students have so little real world experience; they’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed the car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up the garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines.

Through the practice of nature study, your kids are getting a solid foundation for the formal science instruction they will get later on.

Attention and Discrimination
Nature study also cultivates the essential habit of attention and discrimination. Students cannot record, in their nature notebook, what they have not observed well. Therefore, the children learn to value accuracy, which will later benefit them in their formal science studies.

They will also learn to recognize slight differences in natural objects. Charlotte Mason said:

They should be encouraged to make such rough classifications as they can with their slight knowledge of both animal and vegetable forms. Plants with heart-shaped or spoon-shaped leaves, with whole or divided leaves; leaves with criss-cross veins and leaves with straight veins; bell-shaped flowers and cross-shaped flowers; flowers with three petals, with four, with five; trees which keep their leaves all the year, and trees which lose them in autumn; creatures with a backbone and creatures without; creatures that eat grass and creatures that eat flesh, and so on. To make collections of leaves and flowers, pressed and mounted, and arranged according to their form, affords much pleasure, and, what is better, valuable training in the noticing of differences and resemblances.

The power to classify, discriminate, distinguish between things that differ, is amongst the highest faculties of the human intellect, and no opportunity to cultivate it should be let slip; but a classification got out of books, that the child does not make for himself, cultivates no power but that of verbal memory. (1/64)

The last paragraph of that quote, particularly the last line, is significant. Books can “give scientific information and excite intelligent curiosity” (3/281), but the direct study of these objects is the greatest benefit to the children.

Asking Questions and Learning to Think
Essential to the study of science is the art of asking questions. Nature study fosters this art.

Why do birds migrate? Why can I only see Orion in the winter? Why does my hand move up and down when I hold it out the window of a moving car? Why do raindrops bubble on a blade of grass? Why do plants grow up and roots grow down?

Charlotte Mason warns us that adults often provide answers instead of allowing the child to think about it further.

The child must think, get at the reason why of things for himself, every day of his life, and more each day than the day before. Children and parents both are given to invert this educational process. The child asks ‘Why?’ and the parent answers…Let the parent ask ‘Why?’ and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over and over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him––and he will remember it. (1/154)

Of course, this doesn’t apply just to the youngest children. You must allow your older children to sit with questions too. Allow them to think about the things they have seen or read and form conclusions and opinions of their own. You might think their ideas are crazy to start with, but learning to think is essential despite the winding process. Not just for doing science but also for being a person.

Build’s Language Skills
The children then have to figure out a way to express what they are wondering and thinking, and therefore, nature study helps build language skills. Charlotte Mason said:

With his knowledge of things, his vocabulary grows; for it is a law of the mind that what we know, we struggle to express. This fact accounts for many of the apparently aimless questions of children; they are in quest, not of knowledge, but of words to express the knowledge they have. (1/67)

Once again, this habit is fostered during elementary nature study, but it lays a foundation vital to later scientific study.

Learning the Scientific Method
Finally, during nature study, children learn the real scientific method.

Chad Orzel, author of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, makes the point that science is fundamentally a human endeavor — something that we all do, all the time — and that to think scientifically, we use a four-step process:

• Look at some phenomenon in the world. Your child is learning to do through the use of all of his senses.
• Think up a possible explanation for it. Your child is learning to ask questions and to think.
• Test your explanation by further observations or by experiments. Kids perform little experiments all the time.
• Tell everyone you know about the results. Your child is practicing through the use of a nature notebook.

Miss Cooper, a student of Charlotte Mason’s teaching college, said, “The early out-of-door nature study is to be a preparation for the science teaching of the school.” (Nature Study, Parents’ Review, vol 20, p. 337) I hope you can see that it is indeed the case.

Resources:
SMH article, The Real Scientific Method, published 4/2018

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