Sure living books are great for grade school, but should a homeschooler still be using real books (aka living books) at the high school level?
I really don’t see why not. That’s how I, as an adult, learn. Think about it. All adults who are done with their classroom education use real books to learn. Oh, sure, you might use a tutorial to learn PostgreSQL, but a tutorial isn’t a textbook. While some college classes require a textbook, many also require that real books be read or consulted. If I want to know how to garden, I don’t grab the first botany textbook that I can find; I buy a gardening book. Take a look at your local bookstore. Is it full of textbooks? No. That’s because learning is best done through the use of real books.
So why can’t high schoolers learn by using real books, too? Why should high school science education be different? I guess it probably shouldn’t.
However, how can someone like me make sure that my students are properly prepared for college-level science if they’ve not covered what’s in the high school science texts? Well, a high-school-science-teacher homeschooling parent can figure that out. But I can’t. It’s easier and faster to just do what’s in the science text than it is to re-invent the wheel. No pun intended.
So we only do one year of “real book” science in high school. We title the class “Science Survey.” I have no idea if that’s the best title for the class, but it’s good enough for us. If you know of a better name, let me know.
For that class, the student chooses from biographies of scientists or any non-fiction science book that we can find in the library. It has to contain a lot of science; it can’t be a story about the childhood years of Enrico Fermi. My daughter’s already chosen and read a few books. She read that one about Archimedes, I think it was. She read another about a teenage chemist who became a perfumer. She’s read a few others, but I can’t remember the titles. She’s got them written down in her school records, but that’s at her desk a ways away.
Right now we’re reading Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel together as a read aloud. I’m enjoying how Sobel shows Galileo’s excitement about finding four “Jovian planets” and how that when he took a trip from Florence to Rome, he set up his telescope every night along the way. She also tells that when Galileo found two of Saturn’s moons that he sent an encoded note to Johannes Kepler in Prague. Kepler could not read the code, as intended by Galileo. But the code proved to the world that Galileo was the first person to find two moons of Saturn — or it proved it when Galileo released the meaning of the code. He was a little hesitant because he wanted to make sure of a few more things before he told the world, but yet he still wanted to get the credit for the discovery.
So far, it’s a good book and we’re enjoying ourselves reading it. It gives us an example of a real scientist at work and how he recorded his findings and why. Reading books like this makes science seem real to the regular person rather than something only done in labs by people with goggles on. I truly think I’m learning more by reading some of these books with my students than I did taking that required science class at the university. Science doesn’t have to be boring. There are all sorts of science topics out there to choose from when picking real books.
Anyway, if you want to see a list of the books my son read for his class, I’ve posted them over at Homeschool RAQ.
