Helping Kids Blossom in Science

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"Figuring out how nature works," says Jolene Hinrichsen, science-education researcher at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, "is the whole enterprise of science. The first step is to look at nature - carefully - and to begin sorting."

Together, kids and parents can engage in the job of science and have a great time with flowers, observing them closely, sorting them, and putting them into categories. In the doing, kids are actually engaged in a scientific process.

It sounds like fun, so we asked Jolene for tips on how to go about this:

• Go to a meadow or a park, she suggested, and come back with at least 10 flowers.
• Touch, smell, and look at the flowers carefully in order to put them in categories. Decide what the criteria are going to be to sort them. At first, your grouping may be only two categories. For example, let's say that you notice that five flowers are white, and five of them are different colors -- your categories can then become white flowers and non-white flowers. (Why are so many white? Can you think of some reasons")
• At this point, you might draw pictures of those two categories and put names on them.
• Take another look, a new way to organize the flowers. Scoot the flowers back into a pile of 10 again so that they're not in categories, and look for other differences among them. Look at stems. (Juicy stems? Dry stems? Fibrous stem?) Look at leaves. Perhaps the veins inside some of the leaves run parallel to each other; in other leaves, the veins spread out like a hand. Now you might draw a picture of the leaves with these differences.
• Take another look: Do the flowers that are white have the same vein pattern? If not, then you might sort into categories of: white flowers with parallel viens ;white with hand-shaped veins. You might take yet another sorting step: colored flowers with parallel veins and those with hand-shaped veins.

If the kids are eager to do more, Jolene suggests another activity, putting the question: If we cut open this flower, what might we find?

If two flowers are both white, and they both have parallel veins, then you'll probably suspect that they're going to have a lot more things in common than the other three groups (white flowers with leaves with hand-shaped veins; colored flowers with leaves with hand-shaped veins; colored flowers with leaves with parallel veins).

"And it may be true, or it may not be true," cautions Jolene, declaring, "but that's the science part of it, the secret for you to discover, the puzzle to put together."

There are many ways that parents and kids together can enjoy the scientific enterprise, figuring out how nature works. "Families who explore the world together nurture scientific thinkers and good students!" says the National Science Teachers Association Web site. For information and good ideas, check out their Web site at www.nsta.org/parents/.

This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.