The other night at dinner (during my internet outage), we were talking about what Eleanor and Amanda wanted for lunch the next day. Eleanor announced, "If you put salt on apple slices, they don't get brown." My immediate reaction was to tell her that her idea was silly, and that you put lemon juice on apples to keep them from going brown. Not only that, but salted apples would taste terrible!
For the purposes of education, I squelched that reaction. After all, I had never put salt on apple slices, even though I had a pretty good idea of what would happen. I asked Eleanor where she had learned the fact about apples. Her teacher had said so, at least, that's what Eleanor thought she had said. Well, the tried and true way to see if something works is to do it yourself, so I suggested an experiment.
We took 3 slices of apple (Mountaineer apples, very tasty) and sprinkled one with salt, one with lemon juice, and left one alone. The one sprinkled with salt made the paper towel around it wet, but nothing else happened before Eleanor went to bed. We decided to look in the morning.
I felt very proud of myself for helping Eleanor learn how to test things, see things for herself, do a (small) experiment with a control case... Sometimes helping kids learn is less telling them about what happens and just stepping back to see what they can figure out---that way they learn not just about apples (for example) but that they don't have to believe things that don't make sense.
And what did we learn in this case? We learned that Mountaineer apples don't get brown overnight. That, and Eleanor likes the taste of salty apples.
For the purposes of education, I squelched that reaction. After all, I had never put salt on apple slices, even though I had a pretty good idea of what would happen. I asked Eleanor where she had learned the fact about apples. Her teacher had said so, at least, that's what Eleanor thought she had said. Well, the tried and true way to see if something works is to do it yourself, so I suggested an experiment.
We took 3 slices of apple (Mountaineer apples, very tasty) and sprinkled one with salt, one with lemon juice, and left one alone. The one sprinkled with salt made the paper towel around it wet, but nothing else happened before Eleanor went to bed. We decided to look in the morning.
I felt very proud of myself for helping Eleanor learn how to test things, see things for herself, do a (small) experiment with a control case... Sometimes helping kids learn is less telling them about what happens and just stepping back to see what they can figure out---that way they learn not just about apples (for example) but that they don't have to believe things that don't make sense.
And what did we learn in this case? We learned that Mountaineer apples don't get brown overnight. That, and Eleanor likes the taste of salty apples.
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Ella