Home school users in all 50 states as well as Latin America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Korea now use Real Science-4-Kids. An active Yahoo group of 3,000+ maintains notes on the curriculum. In addition, a number of charter, private and public schools use Real Science-4-Kids.
Chemistry, biology, physics, and earth and space curricula provide underlying principles for science. The Real Science-4-Kids approach recognizes learning occurs in stages that require repetition. Exposure to key concepts and internalization of those concepts promotes understanding. The repeatability factor can be likened to understructure. For example, one row of bricks doesn’t provide a strong base; repeating the rows, maintaining good gap coverage, results in a powerful foundation.
Each curriculum teaches bona fide terms and concepts in digestible pieces. This means that children learn essential things well rather than simply learning a random collection of facts, thereby developing a foundation.
There is a natural progression from four foundational disciplines or subjects to a deeper understanding of them. Kogs-4-KidsTM presents a framework for understanding science. The interdisciplinary approach allows for a connection between essential science information and language, history, philosophy, technology, critical thinking and the arts.
Dr. Rebecca Keller, founder, recommends beginning with chemistry, then moving to biology, then physics. Each text contains 10 lessons, each lesson includes a lab, and typically one lesson is taught per week. Generally, a subject is taught in a semester.
Real Science-4-Kids utilizes a student textbook that introduces essential terms and concepts. The pupil then performs a hands-on experiment to help learn the scientific method by doing, thus reinforcing the terms and concepts learned from the text. The students thus begin to develop discoveries; kids find this fun, and parents find that it works.
This unique science curriculum introduces elementary and mid-school students to four core scientific disciplines – chemistry, biology, physics, and earth and space. Subjects are divided into levels, or grade ranges as follows:
Pre-Level: grades K – 3 (Chemistry and Biology currently available); Level 1: grades 4 – 6 (Chemistry, Biology, and Physics currently available); and Level 2: grades 7 – 9 (Chemistry only currently available).
A team of writers is working on the remaining titles in the series. All releases are announced on the Web site. Beta versions of new releases can be viewed as downloadable files prior to publication. For more information, see the Gravitas blog site: http://gravitasgeeks.wordpress.com/
Science can be divided into two parts: 1) the practice of science and 2) the interpretation of science. The practice of science addresses gathering information about the world around us, while the interpretation of science concerns what that information means to the discipline of science, to individuals and to society. Real Science-4-Kids focuses on the first part (the practice of science) by teaching students what is currently known about the world and how it is known. Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design are interpretive frameworks for understanding scientific information and, as such, fall mainly in the second part. Real Science-4-Kids does not adhere to any of the three interpretative frameworks but instead presents students with the most accurate, up-to-date information available which focuses on the practice of science. The interpretation of that information is left to students and parents.
