Let's get Physical

My fetching wife has been homeschooling our children since Zach started kindergarten some 5 years ago. As a 'homeschooling dad' I have been relegated to picking up an occasional book off the floor that need to be put back on the book shelf, or brought in for 'consulting' work when discipline is a problem. Other than that my better half has taken on all of the heavy lifting. This year for the first time I have been brought into the class room as a 'substitute teacher' for one subject, two nights a week (plus a few various outings, to be sure). My task: Teach Physics to our 9, 7 and 5 year-old.

After Reading A Thomas Jefferson Education (Read more about that here), the last thing I wanted to do was get a text book and start throwing equations at them. My goal is to get them to start wondering about Physics, ask questions about the world around them and then be excited about finding the answers. I decided the best approach would be to discover the world along with the great scientists themselves and we should begin at the beginning. We are therefore starting out by reading Archimedes and the Door of Science and after two sessions things are going well. I hope to get them excited about the same things Archimedes was excited about and lead them up to the Copernicus and Ptolemy controversy so as to contrast their thinking. Then move on to Galileo and Newton. I plan on being flexable enough so we can move in directions that they are excited about; so I gave my first assignment: To Wonder. Wonder about how the world works. Ask questions about the things they see. Each of them are to bring 5 questions about how the world works and I plan on taking few of those questions and exploring the solutions with them. By the end of the year I have a modest goal of having them (at least the older two) understand a few concepts like D=Vt (where D=distance, V=Average velocity and t=time) and F=MA (where F=Force, M=Mass, A=Acceleration). Mind you I don't want them to memorize them, I want them to understand them and actually go through the process of deriving them.

That's my goal. I'll post updates on how things are actually going as the year progress.