STEM Activities Can Come From Our Children Being Inquisitive
Does Your Child ask a “Million” Questions
Do your children have a LOT of questions about the world around them? I think that sometimes we as parents forget that things that seem normal to us, may not be normal to our children if it’s their first time seeing a particular thing or if they experience something new. It’s actually good that our children are inquisitive. We don’t want to squelch their curious natures. Let’s try to regularly take some time to help our children find the answers to some of their questions. Using some of their questions, you may be able to come up with some cool STEM activities to do with your children.
Get Your Child to Write Down Their Questions
Sometimes, our children ask so many questions and we can get so busy, that we may forget some of their questions. An idea is to have your child write down some of the questions he or she has. Recently, I had my daughter make a list of some of her questions. The list was quite long. You may be surprised that their questions may lead to some STEM activities.
Some of my daughter’s questions included:
What are diamonds made of? What is a black hole? What is cancer? What is the French Revolution? What is your DNA? What is chicken pox? Why do people let out gas? How do people make wood into paper? How are TVs made? And she had more questions!
A couple of questions my son had included how do glasses help you to see and how do trains work. We watched a video about how the eye works. The video also talked about different problems such as near-sightedness and far-sightedness. I had the kids to draw a picture of the eye from the video.
Investigative Research
Besides watching Youtube vidoes to try to find answers to your child’s question, you all could take a trip to the library and do a little investigative research. Doing some “work” to find the answer to his or her question can be a lesson to the child to show him or her that sometimes you have to put in some effort to find out the answers to his or her questions.
Another option is to ask an expert in the field. You could pay a visit to a friend or a family member who works in a certain field and have your child ask his or her questions. If you don’t know someone who works in a certain field, you can google the profession and randomly call an expert to see if they will let you come by his/her office. I reached out to an architect’s office in my area, and someone who worked there allowed the kids and I to come to the office and ask her questions.
Remember we want to encourage our children to be inquisitive . So the next time your kid starts reeling off a list of questions, take a few minutes to have them write down their questions. Then set aside some time to help your child do some investigative research. The question may lead to a STEM activity that you didn’t have to find on Pinterest. 🙂 A great place to find structured STEM lessons is at www.teachengineering.com.
Comment below with some cool questions your kids have asked you!
