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Explore!

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Nearly everybody has a back yard. If you haven’t, you probably know where there is a vacant lot. Or you may go to a park or a school playground. Wherever you go outdoors, that’s the place to begin your exploring.

An explorer looks carefully at everything around him. …

A good explorer uses scientific methods. …
From page 9 of the crappy old book, Science in Your Own Back Yard— a Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club book– by Elizabeth K. Cooper copyright 1958 published by Harcourt, Brace and Company.

This book’s first two chapters encourage us to “Explore the Yard on Your Stomach” and on our backs. When we’ve finished our initial explorations we’ll set up our back-yard laboratory. (More on this below the fold.) After we’ve located it properly (and asked our parents if it’s okay), we’ll provision it with old spoons, a garden trowel, some single edged razor blades, a kitchen knife, wire, string, notebook, and so on (but no power tools [see footnote 1]). And then we will commence exploring

  • Soil & rock
  • Fossils
  • Water
  • Grass
  • Flowers 
  • Plant from Seeds
  • Plants from Spores [See footnote 2]
  • Earthworms
  • Snails
  • Insects
  • Spiders
  • Birds
  • Other Vertebrate Animals
  • Clouds
  • Weather
  • Atmosphere & Outer Space
  • Stars

I confess that when I commented on “How to Explore the Outdoors with Kids“– a piece at The Weather Channel written for idiots— I knew I had this crappy old book on my shelf. But I had forgotten what a gem it is.  

To find out what different kinds of spiders live around your house and yard, you must organize a spider hunt. Several friends may work together. If you plan to keep the spiders you catch, you will need a jar, with holes punched in the top, for each one. If you put several together in one jar, some of them will probably eat each other. [Page 127]
Life can be nasty, can’t it? [Please note that I did not link to any cannibal stories here.] And what lab equipment do we use to punch the holes? Man. We could poke our eye out in a heartbeat. 
What great stuff! In Chapter 16: Other Vertebrate Animals, we are encouraged to “make a book of the mammals [we] see in [our] neighborhood… . … Here are some suggestions for dividing [our] book into sections.” 
Human mammals. There are so many scientific things to study about people that you could spend your whole life on just this section. You may want to make a special study of yourself, since you are the mammal you know best. 
You could probably spend your whole life unpacking those two sentences. [Cool! I get to use the ‘epistemology’ label!! And create a neuroscience label. Hobbes on the nasty, right?]
~~

This is a book written for kids. I pulled a few passages and did a few online readability tests. Those results and my little bit of experience as a mother are what led me to conclude that the book was written for middle-school aged kids, back in the day. 

Go read the How to Thing at TWC. As I said, it is not clear to me for whom this little diddy was written, although I did discover you don’t need to be as smart as a middle-school aged kid to comprehend it– even though it don’t make no sense. 

On the one hand, we have kids who ask their parents if it’s okay to set up their back-yard laboratory in a particular spot and who can be trusted with single edge razors and kitchen knives. On the other, we have parents who are cautioned to
[m]inimize any challenges or obstacles that may pop up by bringing along some extra snacks, water, dry socks, sunscreen, bug repellent, sweatshirts, and toilet paper. (Hey, you never know!) 
God Bless The Queen. 

Footnote 1: The latest post on Government & Intrusion & Kids & Farms is here: http://bigfoodetc.blogspot.com/2012/04/farm-safety-cont-ive-been-to-romania-i.html

Footnote 2: I did not look carefully at this chapter, but I wonder if by 1958 we’ve stopped classifying yeast as a tiny plant. It’s hard to pin down when the science is settled. You could spend you whole life trying to figure it out– in one science!