Science & Natural History with a 15 Year old Boy

In my last post I shared some thoughts on coming to Ambleside Online late, and the adjustments I made with my older children. This post follows on from some of what I wrote there as it concerns Benj who started AO when he was 12 years of age.

He is nearing the end of AO Year 8 and as many of you would know, this particular year has been updated recently to add in living books for science. Apart from Phineas Gage, one of the new additions which he'd already read a couple of years ago, we've just continued with the book selections before the new plans were added. I added in books to bring him more into line with his actual grade level of Year 10.

What he's done this year:

Natural History - we continue to use Insect Life in Australasia by William Gillies for our special studies. There's a good article here which explains how to implement these studies. We've been doing this once a week as well as continuing with nature walks. In the past two weeks we had a day at the beach and an afternoon/early evening walk at the riverside.

Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov - he's enjoying this book and earlier in the year used Apologia Physical Science for experiment ideas which worked quite well. I found some interesting  videos recently I knew would appeal to him - posted here - and the notebook page above was based on one of them.

Apologia Biology - I picked out a few modules for him to work through; mostly the sections on the cell & DNA. It's a fairly dense book and he's more interested in other areas of science but I'd like him to do some biology and will probably include a biography or other narrative science book on this subject when I find one I like.

From the Year 8 selections:

The Microbe Hunters
William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood 
Johann Kepler bio

Pelicans checking out the local fisherman

Special Study - Insects

From Benj's Biology readings:

The sun descending in the west,   
  The evening star does shine;   
The birds are silent in their nest.   
  And I must seek for mine.

William Blake

A 15 Year old Boy's Keeping

Benj is reading his way through the Renaissance and Reformation with books from Ambleside Online Year 8 and most of his Commonplace entries have been inspired by those books. He chooses his own quotes but when he first started keeping a Commonplace book and happened to comment on something that impressed him while he was reading, I would suggest he record the passage in his book. I don't do that anymore because the habit is in place. I just like reading what he has written and to see what books have kindled his interest enough that he would record something from them.

Recently, he has quoted mostly from Churchill's The New World and Whatever Happened to Justice by Richard Maybury.

It is very helpful to read with a commonplace book or reading-diary, in which to put down any striking thought in your author, or your own impression of the work, or of any part of it; but not summaries of facts. Such a diary, carefully kept through life, should be exceedingly interesting as containing the intellectual history of the writer; besides, we never forget the book that we have made extracts from, and of which we have taken the trouble to write a short review.

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason 

Commonplace Books have been around for hundreds of years and were kept by many great thinkers and writers. I came across this post recently, not from a Charlotte Mason perspective, and not a blog I'm familiar with, but I enjoyed the thoughts there on the how & why of Commonplacing.
Jonathon Swift, the author of the book Gulliver's Travels amongst others, wrote a letter to a young poet in 1720 with this advice:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

 

Science Notebook

Benj is using a combination of Apologia Physical Science and Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov. He loves the detail in Asimov's book and uses Apologia as a general overview and for experiment ideas and this has been working quite well. He's almost finished the Apologia book but will continue with Asimov and start doing Biology, which I'm in the process of planning.

Timeline

Keeping Nature Notebooks

Natural history is a matter of observation; it is a harvest which you gather when and where you find it growing. Birds and squirrels and flowers are not always in season, but philosophy we have always with us. It is a crop which we can grow and reap at all times and in all places and it has its own value and brings its own satisfaction.

John Burroughs (1837-1921)

In the Garden

Mr Froggie went a courtin' - can you find him?

Bees - 10 year old Moozle's journal:

Mosquitoes

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

 John Lubbock (1834-1913)

Camellia sasanquas in flower...

 15 yr old Benji's journal:

Contented cat...

Clouds gathering before a storm...

On our Bush Walk

My journal - I'm not as regular with mine as my children are with theirs but I've always liked pressing flowers and so continue with that.

Do what you can where you are with what you have.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

Autumnal glory...