WAYS IN WHICH CHILDREN LEARN SCIENCE


 E. Children should be encouraged to originate experiments.
Experiments need not always be complicated nor need they be
described in a book. Whether the plan is devised by pupils or
presented in a book, it must be followed carefully and the obser-
vations made accurately.
 F. Simple apparatus is more appropriate for use in the ele-
mentary school than complicated material. Intricate pieces of
apparatus available for borrowing from high school laboratories
sometimes actually distract the attention of children from the
point of the experiment. If the class has available a few pur-
chased materials such as a magnifying glass and prism, prac-
tically everything else needed can be assembled readily by the
children from their school, home, and neighborhood environment.
 G. Many applications to life situations should be made
from an experiment. As in the case of stating the purpose of
an experiment this step should not be taken for granted. An
experiment is done in order to make an idea real. The appli-
cations have to be made to show how important and useful the
idea is. Thus, in the familiar experiment of putting a water
glass over a lighted candle to show what happens when air is
shut off, the application remains to be made to such real situa-
tions as dampers on stoves and methods of putting out fires.
 H. Pupils must exercise great caution in drawing conclu-
sions. Many children jump to conclusions and must be checked
again and again. It is often easy to make a large generaliza-
tion out of a small bit of evidence. Children must also learn to
hold their findings tentative until they can be confirmed by
additional experiments or by authentic sources. It is often
desirable to include a control in the plan for an experiment,
lest the children ascribe the outcome of the experiment to an
irrelevant factor.

Sample Unit
 In use, the four means of learning just described are inter-
mingled. One means is seldom used for long to the exclusion
of one or more of the other means. Thus a good fifth grade
discussion of minerals will lead to the need for reading to locate
further information and then back to discussion, to observation,
probably including a short field trip, and even to experimenting.
 In the following pages a sample unit of work is developed
to show how naturally the ways of learning weave together and
how the text serves as a guide and source of information with-
out confining the study to the book or allowing science learning
to become solely a reading process.
 "The Influence of Changing Weather" was chosen as a
typical phase of work in the second grade.