11-12 year old boys and science question

I let my boys go with this one. My highly sciency one used the Physics book from Master Books and read the chapters and then found an experiment online to illustrate each one. He also lead a robotics club for our group and often asked me to give him a ‘challenge’ to work out. He uploaded his designs onto the internet onto the Mindstorms website and made improvements based on comments he received. He had a great time.

My next one is wanting to be the next Crocodile Hunter and so he has the Zoology coloring book, the biology book from Master Books that he is reading and narrating, the Apologia Marine Biology book (for reference only), his reptile magazine (plus all his reptiles).

We still do nature study and they are to take the lead in teaching the younger ones what they have already learned in this area.

One fun thing we have done is to ‘do a book’ from the library. That means to get a book on any topic (using the days of creation as a framework can be helpful) and then do all the projects in the book. Lifetime Books and Gifts has their books listed in this order, which has made this project easy. http://www.shoplbg.com/cgi/commerce.cgi?search=action&searchstart=41&category=0020

Then there is the Backyard Ballistics book that every boy loves. The only thing I do not let them do is just have an open ended project where their efforts are spent basically staring at pictures on the internet because “I’m looking for something, Mom.” They need to have a goal and they need to be able to show progress. I am not able to teach three different science courses and so I can’t be sitting on them, constantly guiding them. This is just a little caveat we’ve had to put in place because it’s easy to spin off into Neverland when they want to research, but they don’t really want to do the “work” of research (writing, reporting, etc.).

Blessings,

Cindy