Did you know that children spend 14 percent of the time they spend awake between daycare and school? Given this information, it is not surprising that most of the learning occurs "outside": playing in the park, during extracurricular activities, in the museum, taking a walk, through the media and, perhaps most importantly at home.
I am the director of an educational outreach center at Queen's University (Australia) and the festival coordinator Science Rendezvous Kingston: a meeting about science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I also create math content for two training programs for children: The Prime Radicals Y mathXplosion. I have created two tools for parents with the aim of inspiring their children to learn, love and choose mathematics and I am the consultant in the "math talk" of MathStoryTime.
I have worked for decades to encourage parents to get involved in their children's education because I believe that families and schools have a lot to learn from each other. Schools have the academic knowledge to teach and learn, as well as curricula, assessments and assessments; while parents know the motivations, abilities and interests of their children.
Science at home doesn't have to be overwhelmingIt can be something as simple as planting some seeds with a child or helping them collect leaves and insects.
Several studies also show that informal environments such as home (or basically any extracurricular activity) have an important role in science, technology, engineering and mathematics training. This type of activities arouses the interest of students and provides opportunities to expand knowledge and deepen the content on science.
The benefits of learning science at home
Empirical data clearly suggests that experiences outside the classroom strengthen and enrich what has been learned in the field of science at school by reinforcing scientific concepts and practices that have been introduced during school hours. These experiences can occur in museums, extracurricular activities, science and technology centers, libraries, aquariums, zoos, botanical gardens or at the kitchen table.
The experiences outside the classroom They also encourage appreciation and interest in the purpose of science both inside and outside the classroom. These experiences help students understand the importance of science in their daily lives, the depth and scope of science as a field of knowledge and what are the possibilities to make a career in science, whether in the workplace or as fan.
It is no surprise that researchers and science educators actively and informally contact parents to enthusiastically ask them to encourage and support their children to learn science at home, at school and through their local communities
Any parent can help a child with science.
Parents are the first teachers of children and the most important. Their values, beliefs and actions have an enormous influence on decision making and children's successes at the academic level. How many parents transmit the interest and enthusiasm for scientific issues, children benefit at the attitudinal and academic level.
When parents make it clear that they care about science, technology, engineering and mathematics and believe it is important to study them, positively influence in the way in which your children see these subjects and foster their children's academic success in these areas of knowledge.
A mother helps her daughter at the Science Rendezvous Kingston Science Festival 2017. (Garrett Elliott)
Learning about science informally at home is that parents and children explore the possibilities of science in a fun and different way than what is taught in the classroom. Brief interactions between parents and children on science-related topics can make a fundamental difference in the way children perceive science subjects and their grades.
One study, for example, showed that when children's tutors used a mobile application to deal with math at home, their elementary school children showed an improvement in their mathematical abilities in a matter of months. The progress was more dramatic in those families where the children's tutors confessed their enthusiasm for mathematics.
Books and leaves and bugs
When parents actively participate in scientific experiments of walking around the house, they become scientific professors. When parents become collaborators in the collection of leaves or bugs for a child's collection and even help them to classify their treasures with the help of illustrated documentation, they are copying the way scientists work.
When parents curl up with their children to read a book about science together, how can the book be How things work David Macaulay, and then they start examining a can opener to see how it works, they are using a learning model.
When families watch television programs appropriate for children according to their age (such as Sid the scientific child, Project Mc² or NOVA) parents are fostering connections between scientific topics, daily life, work opportunities and scientific training with their attitude And his actions.
Here I leave you two very simple experiments What you can do at home with everyday objects:
Experiment 1: Roll, roll, roll
You will need to: An empty soda can, an inflated balloon and someone with hair.
Instructions: Put the can horizontally on a flat surface (a table or the floor is worth). Then rub the balloon up and down your hair. Then put the balloon near the can without touching it. You will see how the can rolls towards the globe without touching it!
Why does it work? When you rub the ball in your hair, tiny invisible particles called electrons (which have a negative charge) accumulate on the surface of the globe, creating static electricity. Electrons have the power to attract very light objects (such as the soda can) to them.
Experiment 2: Inflate a balloon without blowing
You will need to: A balloon, 40 ml of water (approximately, to give you an idea, a cup contains about 250 ml, so you won't need much), a soda bottle, a straw, the juice of a lemon (or two tablespoons) of vinegar) and three tablespoons of baking soda.
Instructions: Spread the balloon and put 40 ml of water in the soda bottle; Add the baking soda by stirring it with the straw until it has dissolved. Pour the lemon juice (or vinegar) and quickly put the balloon over the mouth of the bottle.
If everything goes well your balloon will inflate!
Why does it work? By adding lemon juice to the bicarbonate a chemical reaction is created because the bicarbonate is alkaline and the lemon juice is acidic and when combined they create carbon dioxide (CO₂). The gas rises through the neck of the soda bottle to the balloon and inflates it.
Author: Lynda Colgan, Primary Mathematics Professor, University of Queens, Ontario
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón.
Photos | Pixabay
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