Seven Year Olds Are Great Scientists

The art of good science teaching is to drop in a great question and then quickly get out of the way, says Jon Scieszka...

I love science. Growing up, I was that kid who was always tromping around in the woods – turning over rocks to see what was living underneath, matching birds with their songs, wondering why sunsets were always red and orange…and never green and blue.

The more I learned about the world, the more I wanted to know. The shape of DNA is a double helix, but how does it replicate itself? A compass needle will point to magnetic north, but why?

I studied science all through college, under the mistaken notion that because I loved science, I should be a doctor. My then-girlfriend / now wife pointed out that I really didn’t like hospitals, and liked sick people even less, so maybe doctor was not the best career choice. She was so right.

So I wrote stories, painted apartments, and taught elementary school. And teaching 2nd grade in New York City is where I learned, from my students, how to be a real scientist. Seven year olds are great scientists. They want to know the what. They want to know the why. And so much is possible.

Everything I write for kids comes from having been a teacher.

It took a bit of trial and error, and plenty of classroom failure, but I finally came to understand that kids learn most and best when they are playing. So my stories are always playing around. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs plays with the elements of fairy tales and narrative perspective. Stinky Cheese Man plays with story structures and the very parts of a book. Maths Curse plays with mathematical concepts and storytelling through word problems. The Time Warp Trio series plays around with sending kids into real historical situations.

In the classroom, I also figured out that kids learned the most when I got out of the way. The best thing I could do was present a topic, a question, a puzzle, and then stand back. The very best lesson I ever taught was the day I lost my voice, and my second graders figured out the inverse connection between multiplication and division…with me sitting in the back of the room, not saying anything.

So my latest series, Frank Einstein is built on exactly my best teaching experiences – getting kids interested in a subject, trusting them as learners, and then getting out of their way.

Frank Einstein is a ten-year-old genius who can invent anything. Over the course of six books he will explore all of science: (from the smallest to the largest) matter, energy, humans, life, Earth, and the universe(s).

With his artificially intelligent robots Klink and Klank, Frank will introduce kids to truly amazing science, inventions, scientific principles and methods and history, and some very bad jokes.

What I would hope kids learn from Frank Einstein is how much we don’t know. I think many kids are disillusioned / bored by science because they think everything has already been discovered, everything is already known. Science is just memorising facts. But the truth is the exact opposite. The best and greatest scientists of every era have always said they are truly humbled by how much we don’t know. And every great scientist asked questions.

So please feel free to play with Frank Einstein. Pose questions. Puzzle over answers. Tell bad jokes. Then stand back and marvel at the genius of our kid scientists.

About the author

Jon Scieszka is a children’s authors and former elementary school teacher. He has sold more than 11 million books and lives in Brooklyn, New York.