Teaching Kids About Science
Kids never look like they’re listening, but they file away everything you tell them. So don’t lose the opportunity to teach. Even if they don’t understand everything you say, they will remember something of what you said, and, more important, they will learn that you value learning.
But what can you really teach them science? If you’re like most adults, you may fear that you have only a tenuous grasp on science yourself, and any misconceptions you pass on to your kids will only hurt them. Do not fear! Science is a way of thinking, not a collection of facts. So your job isn’t to pass on a complex set of ideas, but to instill a sense of wonder and healthy skepticism.
Take the sun, for instance. On a warm, sunny day, you can look up at our home star and wonder with your child why it shines. The answer, of course, is nuclear fusion. But that’s the name of the thing, not the thing itself. Avoid the temptation to answer questions with just a name. That teaches something, but it’s not science. Instead, try to explain the process. Taking this route will lead to unexpected relationships, more opportunities for teaching and for sparking your child’s curiosity.
To explain the sun’s light, you can start by talking about atoms. Everything is made of atoms, including the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, and even your child! Most of the time, the atoms keep a safe distance from each other. But inside the sun, the atoms are forced to come very close to each other, and that’s why the sun shines.
This will naturally lead to other questions.
“Why do the atoms come so close together in the sun?” Ah, because the sun is so big! If you had a mountain on top of you, your atoms would be very close together. And the atoms in the center of the sun have many mountains on top of them!
“And why does pushing atoms together make them shine?” That’s a hard question. Here on earth, when we put some atoms together, we can combine to give off light. That’s called burning, and we thought that’s what happened in the sun. But fires burn out, and the sun has been shining for a very, very long time. Something else happens in the sun: the atoms in are so close together that they merge into other kinds of atoms.
“How?” Well, atoms are made up of a nucleus and electrons. You can always tell what kind of atom you have by how big the nucleus is. But in the sun, the atoms get so close together that the two nuclei become just one bigger nucleus.
Just like that, you’ve told your kids about the atomic theory of matter, atomic weight, the key idea behind nuclear fusion, with a dash of chemistry thrown in. Maybe your kids won’t understand it all, but they will learn enough, and they will thank you for it.