My name is Kelly Epperson. I am the father of four great kids, husband to my awesome teacher wife, a mathematician (MS Mathematics, College of Charleston ’08), a one-time editor of math textbooks (for five years… That’s a lot of math reading!), a musician (As often as I can find the time. I have a BA in Music Composition, College of Charleston ’07), and a US Marine Aviator (Active duty for 9 years, now a reservist). I’m also an author. …
I’ve written several articles recently about having science adventures with your kids and students. Depending on how in-depth you go with these, they can take more or less work. I’d recommend starting simple. In fact, I’d recommend keeping most of the Adventures simple, and working for incremental progress from one session to the next, rather than attempting to exhaust an entire subject in a single sitting. For one thing, anybody who’s ever been on Wikipedia knows you can never exhaust…
All right we’re convinced. Science Adventure is awesome and kids love it. But how do we actually do it? I’m glad you asked! The answer? Wait for it… No seriously let’s talk about some other stuff first, and we’ll answer that question at the end. First things first: I don’t know your kid or student at all. More than that, what do you like to do with them? What you know about science already? What do you think is most…
I’ve talked generally about this same topic in another article but I think bears a closer focus. What do we think of when we think of Adventure? Some people probably think of things like skydiving or mountain climbing. Some people probably think of hiking or scuba diving. I’m sure there are many more examples that we use. Why those and not knitting? For the record, I don’t have anything against knitting. I think it’s a pretty cool thing to do…
Sometimes kids get bored with school. Sometimes they get bored with a single subject. Whatever that subject is, it’s our job as parents and educators to get them excited about it again. If your kid hates reading, maybe they are reading the wrong things. I personally think it would be better for a kid to devour comic books (even poorly written ones) than to stop reading all together because they don’t enjoy Great Expectations. (Once they love reading again,…
What is Science Adventure? Great question. When most people think about science they think about nerdy folks wearing glasses and pocket protectors. Maybe even a lab coat. They think about graphs and numbers. They think about papers with complicated words that seem to make no sense unless you are already an expert in that field. Some of those things are true. Some of them are not always true. For instance, I’m a pretty nerdy person, I used to wear glasses,…