Benefits & Takeaways

Science labs help with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They help to flesh out memorized facts by adding depth and nuance, plus labs make the facts memorable. Students can compare and contrast the data they find, then draw logical conclusions from their results and finally analyze their findings. And then there’s recognizing beauty, which is easy to do when things are observed in labs. For example, God made spiders, and many people fear and hate them. But, after weeks of studying and observing them firsthand students can come to better appreciate how carefully and wonderfully God made His creation. Students could even find some spiders cute. If a teacher simply tells a student to appreciate the beauty of a spider, or a student reads about it, the lesson doesn’t last. But have the students do the work and discover for themselves how awesomely they were created and the lessons last much longer.

Science is inherently different from language arts, and as such its approach should be different as well. Students shouldn’t be limited to reading books or hearing lectures on science, so I’ll give practical approaches to how it can be taught in a way that is more closely aligned to exploring God’s truth, goodness, and beauty as well as expound on the reasons why students should do the work of learning science.