✨Why Your 9-Year-Old Is Ready for Geophysics (Yes, Really)
How to Use Simple Earth Experiments to Teach Scientific Thinking and the Scientific Method at Home
As a former scientist, you might assume science is the easiest subject for me to teach my children.
In some ways, you would be right.
It’s easy for me to answer their questions.
What are clouds? → water vapor condensing around dust particles. Why does the moon changes shape? → our vantage point shifts as it moves around Earth.
But answering science questions is not the same as teaching a child to think like a scientist.
That part is harder. Much harder.
The scientific method is one of humanity’s greatest inventions — and if you want your child to be a formidable thinker, they must learn it.
The process of observation, prediction, testing, and revision built the modern world — from electricity to the computer you are reading this on.
Scientific thinking will be how our children build the future.
And yet, many children are taught science like a series of multiple choice questions rather than a system of thinking.
For a long time, I struggled too.
It was easy to show my 6 year old the beauty of the ocean and the stars, but I wanted more. I wanted them to form their own ideas and test them. We did small versions, but nothing quite like what I wanted.
I finally understand why.
You can’t think deeply about what you know nothing.
If I ask my children, “Why do stars twinkle?” I get imaginative answers.
“They are blinking.”
“The wind shakes them.”
“They are dancing.”
These are beautiful ideas.
But they are not scientific reasoning.
Many assume because innovators are often young, they are novices. But that’s not true. They usually possess deep, focused knowledge of their field.
Louis Braille, who created the Braille system after losing his sight in childhood, spent years experimenting with tactile writing systems. By age fifteen, he had developed the six-dot Braille system that is still used today.
He was not a novice. Nor was he an expert in the traditional sense. He was in the intellectual middle ground where creativity thrives.
So if we want to train reasoning, critical thinking, scientists, we must train our children in areas where they know the most.
That should leave you asking…
What field do children actually know something about?
Surprisingly, the answer is geophysics.
At first glance, geophysics sounds complicated and hard — and it can be. But at its foundation it’s earth, sand, and water. Your child has been building expertise in geophysics since they were toddlers digging in your sandbox.
This year, I wanted my science club (ages 9-11) to do a REAL experiment. One that was 100% driven by them from start to finish.
We’ve of course done experiments, but usually I have to feed them the hypotheses and suggest what and how we study them.
This time, I said, “We’re going to study rivers. I’ve got a board, sand, and a hose.” They immediately had a thousand ideas from building dams, watching floods, choosing the safest place for a house, and figuring out how to protect it when the water rose.
I took their ideas and helped turn them into quantifiable hypotheses, methods they could actually test, results they observed, and their first serious lab report.
It was the first time they ran a real experiment from start to finish.
I will remember forever — and they will too.
When I say joy and rigor belong together, this is what I mean.
In the rest of this post, I’ll show you exactly how to do a proper experiment —from hypothesis to methods, results, discussion — in your backyard or local river.
But whether you start with geophysics or somewhere else, just start.
Your children are capable of so much♥️
If you also want your children to do a real science experiment, below you’ll find 7 steps I used to help my kids design and run a real scientific experiment. These steps work in any field, but examples are given for geophysics.
You’ll also see a lab report written by my 11-year-old, along with a downloadable lab report template to help you get started.
This part is for my companions who generously support my work. Thank you all♥️