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Where to find inspiration: Exploration Station
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I am very excited today to be beginning a series of weekly interviews with inspirational children's activity bloggers. These creative parents and educators generously take the time to share their projects, activities, lessons and experiments with the world. Be sure to watch each of their blogs for a steady stream of ideas and inspiration and subscribe to these articles to keep from missing any blogger spotlights.
Today, we will be examining one of my favorite blogs. Exploration Station is full of simple but fun science activities that cultivate curiosity and teach kids how the world works. Reading about this family's adventures in learning will make you want to dig around in your kitchen cabinets and play. Let's hear from the creator of Exploration Station:
Tell me about you and your blog.
My name is Casey. I am a 39 year old former scientist in the field of biotechnology. I had 12 years of clinical laboratory experience in three different areas (microbiology, forensic DNA, and medical genetics). I now stay at home with my three wonderful girls ages 7, 5.5, and 4.
My Exploration Station blog is devoted to science experiments for young children. We try different types of fun experiments in biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. We learn about the animals and birds in our area through backyard and neighborhood exploration. We’ve also gone on scavenger hunts looking for colors and shapes.
What is your philosophy on education?
While my children go to public school, I believe that learning starts at home, and the learning doesn’t have to stop when the bell rings after school. I believe that children are naturally curious about the world around them and I focus on fun, sensory, hands-on experiences that the children can learn from. Children are natural scientists – they frequently try to find cause and effect on their own and they ask tons of questions. I use their curiosity and find sensory activities that would appeal to their age and attention span. While most of my experiments are geared for 5 and up, my 4 year old has shown an interest in them as well.
Where do you get your ideas?
I get my experiments mostly from some wonderful websites on the internet. It’s a treasure trove of information and I can link up readers to the exact experiments I use so they can see where I originally found them. Some experiments are from homeschooling bloggers who write about what they’ve tried at home, and some are from science education websites and some are directly from museum websites that offer experiments to try at home.
However, I have also used science experiment books for children from the library, and one of my more recent chemistry experiments came directly from a PBS episode of Fetch with Ruff Ruffman!
What advice or tips can you give parents and educators?
My advice is this:
1.Don’t be afraid to do science experiments at home. There are many safe, kid-friendly experiments that can be done with common household materials and ingredients from your kitchen cabinets (some need adult supervision of course).
2.You don’t need expensive kits to do science. Your cabinets or the grocery store is filled with most of the materials you need to do some great experiments.
3.There are no mistakes in doing science. I mean, sure, the experiment might not give you the desired effect you were looking for, but you learn from those mistakes. And in reality, many inventions were based on someone’s experimental mistake that a creative person found a use for.
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