Some Hands-on, Kids-oriented Science Videos

To share with others if you think they’d like them …

During the summer I asked someone who works for the Biden Administration’s Education Department to recommend to me a great book on education policy.  Although she’d never read it herself, she said she’d heard good thing about Natalie Wexler’s “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System – And How to Fix It,” which I read.  I found it a great book as well, and what was striking was how closely its recommendations dovetailed with what my kids and I had been doing during COVID.

Wexler’s main point is that kids will learn to read more easily when they already have some of the background knowledge of the factual, historical, and scientific principles behind the subjects they’re reading about, an approach that’s quite different from prevailing pedagogical practices.  As Wexler explains:

The theory that has shaped the American approach to elementary education goes like this: Reading—a term used to encompass not just matching letters to sounds but also comprehension—is a set of skills that can be taught completely disconnected from content. It doesn’t really matter what students are reading. Teach them to identify captions in a simple text—or find the main idea, or make inferences, or any one of a number of other skills—and eventually they’ll be able to grasp the meaning of any text put in front of them. And, the argument goes, through the third grade, children need to spend their time “learning to read” before they can progress to “reading to learn.” Social studies and science can wait; history is too abstract for their young minds and should wait. In the early years, the focus must be on the reading skills that will equip students to acquire knowledge about the world—later … By 2012, early-elementary teachers reported spending an average of only sixteen minutes a day on social studies and nineteen on science—figures that, because they are self-reported, may well be overestimates.

The results of that predominant approach have not been good:

[D]espite many hours of practice and an enormous expenditure of resources, American students’ reading abilities have shown little improvement over more than twenty years, with about two-thirds of students consistently scoring below the “proficient” level. Most fourth-graders aren’t actually ready to progress from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Writing scores are even worse: about three-quarters of eighth- and twelfth-graders score below proficient. International tests have shown that our literacy levels are falling, for both children and adults.

And here’s where the book started to resonate with me:

Many parents I’ve spoken with are unaware of the prevailing view that teaching history and non-hands-on science is developmentally inappropriate—as I was when my own children were in elementary school. Like me, they’ve seen their kids become fascinated by those topics through books they read at home and family outings to museums and places like Williamsburg. It’s never occurred to them that the topics are inappropriate, and they may not even notice that the school curriculum fails to include them … What if it turns out that the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to focus on comprehension skills at all but to teach kids, as early as possible, the history and science we’ve been putting off until it’s too late? A handful of schools across the country have been experimenting with that approach—which, in the context of American education, represents a radical break with the status quo—with sometimes astonishing results … The widespread belief among educators that history and non-hands-on science are inappropriate for young children isn’t just at odds with what many parents sense intuitively. It’s also not supported by the evidence … In another study, researchers read preschoolers from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds a book about birds, a subject they had determined the higher-income kids already knew more about. When they tested comprehension, the wealthier children did significantly better. But then they read a story about a subject neither group knew anything about: made-up animals called wugs. When prior knowledge was equalized, comprehension was essentially the same. In other words, the gap in comprehension wasn’t a gap in skills. It was a gap in knowledge.  The implication is clear: abstract “reading ability” is largely a mirage constructed by reading tests. A student’s ability to comprehend a text will vary depending on his familiarity with the subject; no degree of “skill” will help if he lacks the knowledge to understand it. While instruction in the early grades has focused on “learning to read” rather than “reading to learn,” educators have overlooked the fact that part of “learning to read” is acquiring knowledge … Test designers also attempt to compensate for the inevitable variation in students’ background knowledge. Students living in the West might happen to know more about the Rocky Mountains, while those in the South might know more about hurricanes. So the tests might include one passage on each topic. But kids with less overall knowledge and vocabulary are always at a disadvantage. While the tests purport to measure skills, it’s impossible for students to demonstrate those skills if they haven’t understood the text in the first place. The bottom line is that the test-score gap is, at its heart, a knowledge gap.

And here’s why this resonated with me.  While my kids were at home for schooling during COVID, I decided to have them watch some wonderful documentaries on science and history.  I didn’t know how it was going to go (and I didn’t push it too hard, requiring just about an hour or so of documentary-watching during lunchtime), but I knew I’d hit on something when, after finishing a documentary on electricity, my 9 year-old son spontaneously stood up on the couch and started clapping.  (That documentary was Jim Al-Khalili’s Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity.)  After that I decided the kids were ready for some hands-on science activities, and we ended up making several of our own home-made science documentaries.

Now, I know the kids didn’t fully absorb everything we went over, but they absorbed a lot.  As Wexler writes:

As another iconic twentieth-century educational psychologist, Jerome Bruner, argued, “any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.” … The more knowledge a child starts with, the more likely she is to acquire yet more knowledge. She’ll read more and understand and retain information better, because knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge … [Linnea] Wolters tries to get across the message that [knowledge] is about “exposure, not mastery.” In other words, it’s okay if students don’t absorb every detail presented in the dense “domains.” What’s important is that they absorb the big ideas, which they’ll be exposed to in multiple ways.

Ronald W. Clark, in his book Einstein: His Life and Times, writes that Einstein himself said to fellow physicist Louis de Broglie that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description “that even a child could understand them.”  We tried to put these videos together in that spirit.

The first documentary my kids watched was The Science of Bubbles.  Then we made our own on the same subject:

Next we explored the science of electricity and magnetism, their relationship to each other, their use in motors and generators, and their impact on the technological progress we see all around us today:

My daughter used to be afraid of lightning, and learning more about something helps take the fear away, so she made the following presentation for a school project:

Both my kids also love video games, and that love was the springboard to exploring the history of the use of signals to communicate information, from African drums, to Morse Code, to Claude Shannon’s use of binary switch systems to help create computers, and ultimately electronic gaming:

Along the way we also made some shorter videos exploring related topics, like how different things absorb heat differently:

And how air pressure works:

If you know anyone who might share this educational philosophy, or who homeschools their kids, please forward this post to them if you think they’d like it.

Cheers, and happy science!