The author, Mary Daly, explains her book and purposes in this overview.
I have long had a concern about the teaching of science. Most of the materials on the market are so scattered that I cannot think that children will have a clear concept of the meaning and value of science, nor any feeling that they can master its contents in any way. Indeed, most texts are centered on defining science as the product of a specific "method" of thought which has to do with hypotheses and experiments and records and reports. Boring ...and not at all the way Einstein or anybody else I know of actually operated.
Anyway, Natural Science was born in response to the command in Genesis: "Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it." We cannot subdue – or exert stewardship – over what we do not understand. Science is about understanding the material world, our very exciting and beautiful home. In the spring of 2000, members of the local homeschool support group met for a week's science camp, and the next two years, followed up with weekly (almost weekly) science lessons.
The principle of organization is to understand the magnitudes – the sizes – of things and how their scale limits what they can be and do. A star, for example, cannot be much smaller than our sun – except by being fantastically dense – because the nature of stars requires that their gravity bring about their burning. A fly doesn't have enough gravity to burn that way. The planet Jupiter has almost enough.
With the curriculum organized around magnitudes, we had a principle of order for the relationships between all the disciplines of natural science, and as our body of knowledge increased, it was always interactive with previous information. Furthermore, there are only 45 magnitudes between the quark and the universe; this is a small enough number for any child to comprehend. He can finish the course feeling that he knows the universe – and why not? It is his home.
The science camp material is now available, suitable for a camp, or a semester, or up to a year for a small child. It includes:
1. A booklet about the 45 orders of magnitude – sorted by powers of ten – which form the universe as far as we know it. The booklet goes very slowly through the nine orders readily recognizable to ordinary sight – from a meter down to a tenth of a millimeter, and then up to ten kilometers. (It is really essential to use metric measure for this exercise. It is not assumed that the student already knows it.)
2. A set of 45 cardstock dividers, numbered and color-coded, one for each order of magnitude. These are to be placed in a notebook and materials collected illustrating objects at each magnitude are to be placed in each section by the student. These materials can be pasted pictures, drawings, reports, web printouts – whatever best represents what the student has considered at that order of magnitude, and according to his level of comprehension.
The color-coding of the dividers has to do with the fact that the smallest things we consider – electrons and protons, are studied in physics. The next smallest – molecules – are the study of chemistry. Then biology, with green dividers, and so forth.
I will be working to get the following year's lessons into print. They strengthen the magnitudes theme by taking various objects and explaining their characteristics, always in relationship to the orders of magnitude that shape them. Of course the lessons were printed at the time for my students, but not always in a well-finished form...
