It Looked Liked Magneto Had Visited My Poor Kitchen!

 I thought lessons had finished for the day when a late afternoon mystery parcel arrived as I was cooking tea. Inside was a pack of magnets I had impulsively brought from amazon as a last attempt to introduce the topic to the girls. They have been quite resistant to learning this topic when I tried to introduce it via books and YouTube videos, and I was willing to try one last teaching method before shelving the topic and moving on to another for the time being. My girls usually cannot resist a science practical, however today there was no big build up or preparation as I wanted them to simply gravitate towards the magnets themselves. They had wandered down to the kitchen to investigate when tea was going to be ready and to see what had arrived in the post. I waved vaguely in the direction of the mystery box on the table whilst stirring the pot on the oven top.

The following half an hour was one of the most impromptu, exciting and fruitful lessons we have ever had. It was an absolute roaring success, despite the trail of metal objects left in the girls wake.

Within minutes of being equipped with a magnet each they were running and jumping around the kitchen with a great deal of excited squeals, which brought Xander down the stairs to investigate as well. I remained a spectator at this point, just keeping a watchful eye that they were keeping safe after I issued a stern health and safety warning against swallowing a magnet.

They methodically went round the kitchen testing different materials and came up blank with fabric, wood, plastic, glass and china. They soon figured out about the poles reactions to each other and was able to identify that the only material which magically stuck to the magnet was metal. Their ingenuity for sniffing out metal objects and their train of thought behind their exploration surprised me in fact. Once they realised the magnet stuck to the radiator, they immediately ran to the metal sides of shelves. Interestingly they then chose to split up and explore on their own.


The kitchen was filled with excited children and shrill shrieks of ‘Look at this! I found another one!’. One girl thought of the oven, the other ran to the tinned tomato shelf, then one ran to a bbq apparatus, the other to the cutlery, one ran to the house door keyring, and the other thought of a metal tin. This continued for quite a while before they started to their own individual projects. Kira collected several metal objects and placed them on a plastic tray and fished for the metal objects over and over again. Sophia collected the multitude of bar hooks from around the shelving and was hooking them one by one to each other attached to the magnet. 

Over tea they were shouting over each other trying to tell me what they had learnt, and asking me questions about the science behind it. They had sufficiently learnt what they needed to for the subject matter this year within half an hour. Task completed along with tea.

The beauty of home educating is that you have the opportunity to change up the lesson plan at will if the current one is not working. The key is to keep patient and to try different methods until you reach the magic which works for your child. It is not failure to have to shelve a topic if it is not the right time for your child, have a chat with them and ask them what they’re not liking about the topic, try different ways to explore the subject matter and then put it aside if all else fails. The magic moment will happen at some point.

 

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