Teaching science to a 4 years old — Homeschooling series
We moved to Germany few years back when our daughter was 3 years old. A year passed by in adapting to a new environment without her grand parents, cousins and friends. Berlin is notoriously known for it’s gray, harsh and depressing winters. We landed on the “poor but sexy” city during one cold winter morning, when the temperature was 4 degrees. Can you imagine the extreme shift in weather and the shock it might have on a 3 year old kid? 30 degrees in Chennai, down to 4 degrees in Berlin. We were waiting in this candy shop next door, for the keys to our new apartment. Every time someone opened the door the freezing ‘luft’ of Berlin attacked us. However my daughter was sleeping like an angel, when I was thinking how she was gonna survive the winter. But we did survive 2 winters and now she is enjoying her second spring in Berlin. If you ask me, I would say my daughter has very good survival skills. Above all she had her wonder woman at home, her mother. My wife quit her job to help me survive in a new city after we decided to move abroad.
So setting the survival part aside, human life needs a purpose. We all chase something, just to keep our brains in the dark. Because if we sit idle we really begin to think why do we exist? We tend to think if we are living a worthy life. Well these thoughts are vivid and extremely dangerous. So we need a job, an education or a hobby just to suppress these thoughts. Does the same apply to a kid? No, it doesn’t for a toddler, but who knows. The fact is, if you let a toddler play in the mud, it will stay there for ages. Laughing and making a mess, to its heart’s content. But soon the kid might have to start it’s marathon, before it’s brain thinks about the question of life. So as a parent we need to push this little satellite into the orbit. In a perfectly calculated moment, with a precisely calculated momentum. So we did that to our daughter.
My wife was so persistent in teaching her the alphabets even when she was 3 years old. They both used to fill the wall with arts and crafts. Everyday when I came home from work, I saw one new artwork on the wall which showcased how good she was taught. But did she grasped what her mother was teaching her? Well that’s a million dollar question. You never know if they are really learning it, or pretending to escape from it soon, so they can go back to play. Few months with her mother, my daughter really started saying all the alphabets in English and 1 word for each of the alphabet. We have a saying in Tamil which goes
“எழுத்து அறிவித்தவன் இறைவன் ஆகும்”
Your teacher (who taught you the letters) is your God
So in a way her mother became her God one more time. But when she started teaching her numbers, my daughter showed a little aversion. We can very well experience her rebellion towards math. A clear sign she is going to be a normal human, I was seriously happy about it though. My daughter is not going to be a pain in the arse of another human being. I don’t want her to solve a mathematical equation which some quantum scientist left unsolved. I want her to sleep peacefully at 10, after watching a RomCom in Netflix. What good is a Nobel, if you can’t sleep at night. Nobel is not the birth right of every human, but a good 8 hour sleep is. Do you know there is a thing called dopamine in your brain which rewards you the pleasure and motivation. This little hormone will not secrete when there is a sleep deprivation. So even though you have done something phenomenal in the field of science, if there are no dopamine in your brain your achievement is worth nothing to you.
So back to the math, it was clear the way of teaching her, needs to be different. Or else she will lose her interest in learning.
A good student is someone who has an interest to learn.
So if I were to teach her Science or Math, I can not do it in a normal way. I can not write the numbers myself and tell her to copy what I wrote. It will make her lose her interest in learning. So I used a tool which I hated to use even at work. PowerPoint. And it was not just the PowerPoint, but a little mix of story telling. Combined together they worked like magic.
Have you ever tried learning science from the life you are living? The world we live in, teaches more science to us than all those text books we read at school. Where do you think the first scientist of this world learnt science from? So I decided to teach her science, from our day to day life. With photos and slideshows as tools.
I started teaching her materials first. Metal, Plastic, Glass and Wood. I pasted few photos of these in each slide. We played a little game of finding these materials around our house and wherever we went together. She loved it and remembered it for such a long time. I actually didn’t even repeat it multiple times for few consecutive days. A child has a photographic memory, all humans do. Remember the Knowledge transfer session which was easy to understand when the presenter came in with a flow diagram instead of code. So I had few slides showing the materials and where she can find it in real life. And the slides ended in Wood. This is where I started to weave a little story for her.
The next lesson we learnt was “What is wood”. How do we cut the trees, carry them in trucks, shape those logs and make furniture out of them. I also showed her how the paper she paints everyday is made from trees. She really understood not to waste paper when I showed her that a tree is getting killed for what she threw in the dustbin.
A tree was what she saw in her previous lesson. And the next day she was waiting for her next science class eagerly. She was amazed to see the twist in our story when she saw a lightning on top of the tree. The tree starts to catch fire and then the topic of the lesson appeared, Discovery of fire. Her little eyes were filled with surprise like those cavemen who first saw the first fire. Then I narrated her the story of how humans created fire. Followed by the lesson of how a tree catches fire because of the cellulose inside (which turns into char under a certain temperature — Skipped this part). Too much for a 4 years old, yeah but I am just telling her stories about life. Not lecturing a lesson some adult educator thought is right for a different age group to learn. Trust me when I say her favorite word for few days was ‘cellulose’ :)
I am not sure how this experiment will go, but there is this beautiful thing which happens during homeschooling. The parent who teaches, learns a lot of interesting things which his/her teacher never taught him/her. When you teach your kid science, you will discover the little student inside yourself, who was hiding inside without any interest. Because learning was never fun before. Because for some countries the education is just a race of blind horses.
