“The essential mission of school science was to prepare pupils for civilized citizenship by revealing to them something of the beauty and the power of the world in which they lived, as well as introducing them to the methods by which the boundaries of natural knowledge had been extended.” -Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education
In a pure Charlotte Mason school, students studied several streams of science through living books at the same time. Instead of the typical American public school sequence of biology, chemistry, and then physics, students would be studying biology and chemistry and physics, plus some earth science and other sciences. Nor did CM students only read, experimentation was an integral part of the science.
You have several options. No mater what option you choose, don’t skip the geography reading or map drills listed in each year’s science section.
- Use a traditional curriculum in a traditional order. For a plug and play experience with active teaching help, we suggest Thinkwell’s Biology, Chemistry, and calc-based Physics. These give you the option of taking them for AP credit, and we have found them to be suitably rigorous for most students.
- Use a traditional curriculum and add a few living books in a traditional order. Feel free to pull from the option 3 booklist, but make sure not to overload your student.
- Follow the curriculum laid out on each Year’s page. These use living books in multiple fields of study with weekly experimentation, and use MIT’s OpenCourseware as a resource for lectures, problems and experiments for core lab classes -AND/OR- dual enrollment in community college classes.
Expansion Suggestions:
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick
- The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
- The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
- Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe by George Johnson
- Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin
- The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel
- More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick
- Big Data and Computing
- A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming by Paul Edwards
- Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age by James Essinger
- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
- ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
- A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming by Paul Edwards
- Bioethics and Ethics in STEM
- Biology and Genetics
- Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox
- Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley
- The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James Watson
- Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner
- Biopunk: Solving Biotech’s Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages by Marcus Wohlsen
- Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox
- Botany, Ecology, and Zoology
- The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman
- Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors
- Social Life in the Insect World by J. H. Fabre
- Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
- Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee
- Essential Muir: A Selection of John Muir’s Best Writings
- The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben
- The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman
- Chemistry
- H2O: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball
- Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry by Patrick Coffey
- Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur
- Bill Hammack on Michael Faraday’s The Chemical History of the Candle [Video]
- The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
- Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik
- Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks
- H2O: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball
- Engineering and Innovation
- General STEM
- Geology
- Nature’s Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything by Doug Macdougall
- Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
- Written in Stone: The Hidden Secrets of Fossils and the Story of Life on Earth by Brian Switek
- The Planet in a Pebble: A journey into Earth’s deep history by Jan Zalasiewicz
- Nature’s Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything by Doug Macdougall
- Medicine
- Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre
- The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine by Roy Porter
- And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
- Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington
- Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre
- Physics
- Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon
- Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson
- Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman
- Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman
- Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon
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