Last Thursday, my sixth-grader sat at the kitchen table with a study guide titled “Weather Unit Review.” There were fourteen terms to define, from evaporation to condensation to precipitation. She had a highlighter in one hand and a look of pure boredom on her face.
“Mom, do we have to know all these words?” she asked.
“For the test, yes,” I said.
“But why do we have to know them?”
She wasn’t being difficult. She genuinely didn’t see the connection between a list of definitions and the rain that had been falling all afternoon outside our window. And honestly? She had a point.
I’ve spent over a decade teaching middle school science, and I’ve also sat through more “science homework” sessions than I can count as a parent. In both roles, I keep coming back to the same question: What are we actually trying to do in science class?
Because right now, a lot of what my daughter brings home feels less like science and more like vocabulary drills. And I think we can do better.
Cut the Memorization That Doesn’t Stick
The biggest thing I’d cut from the science curriculum is the heavy emphasis on memorizing terms and disconnected facts. My daughter can define evaporation on Friday, but by the following Wednesday she’ll probably call it “the water thing” again—because she never actually saw it happen. She never watched a puddle disappear from the driveway and wondered where it went.
Memorization isn’t useless. Some things just need to be remembered. But when the main goal is to match the correct word to the correct definition on a multiple-choice test, kids learn that science is about having the right answer, not about figuring things out.
I’d also cut the idea that there’s one perfect, step-by-step “scientific method.” In reality, scientists don’t follow a straight line. They mess around, make mistakes, change their questions, and circle back. Yet we keep handing out those neat little posters with five arrows in a row, like discovery is a recipe. That poster might be easy to grade, but it teaches a false story about how knowledge actually happens.
Include More “I Don’t Know” Moments
What would I keep? I’d start with the stuff that makes science feel like science: genuine curiosity, uncertainty, and the chance to investigate something you don’t already know the answer to.
A few weeks ago, my daughter came home from school with a worksheet about endangered species. She read a paragraph about pandas and answered three questions. Nothing was wrong with it, exactly. But she didn’t ask a single question about why animals become endangered or whether anything could be done. The worksheet didn’t leave room for that.
Compare that to what happened the next weekend when our backyard bird feeder went empty. We filled it up, and my daughter asked, “Why do the chickadees show up first but the blue jays wait?”
We didn’t have a worksheet for that. We just stood at the window and guessed. I told her I wasn’t sure either. Then we looked it up, and she decided to test whether putting seed in two different spots at different times would change the order of birds.
That’s not a fancy lesson. It didn’t check any curriculum boxes. But she was doing real science: observing, asking, predicting, testing. There was no memorized vocabulary. There was just a problem she actually cared about.
Let Kids Get Their Hands Dirty
Another thing I’d include more of is hands-on work that doesn’t have a neat, guaranteed outcome. Real experiments. The kind where something can fail, or spill, or not work, and that’s part of the process.
When I taught seventh grade, we did a unit on plant growth. The textbook had a diagram of a seed sprouting, with little arrows showing water moving up the stem. My students nodded along. But the learning really happened when we planted actual seeds in small cups on the windowsill.
Some seeds didn’t sprout. One group overwatered theirs and watched the soil turn moldy. Another group forgot to water theirs for a week, then panicked and drowned them. They argued about what went wrong. They asked if they could try again. They were more invested in those sad little cups of soil than they had been in any textbook all year.
I think that’s what science should look like more often: kids making a mess, making a mistake, and then making sense of it.
Drop the “Right Answer” Pressure
Here’s something I’ve noticed both as a teacher and as a parent: kids are terrified of being wrong. A raised hand goes down fast if a student isn’t sure. And I don’t blame them—we grade them on being right, and we praise them when they know the answer immediately.
But science is full of wrong turns. The more we can normalize that, the better.
One small thing that helped in my classroom was changing the way I asked questions. Instead of saying, “What is condensation?” I started saying, “Where do you think the water on this cold glass came from?” Then I’d wait. I’d let kids throw out ideas without raising their hands. I’d ask, “Who thinks something different?” and actually mean it.
At home, I’ve started doing something similar with my daughter. When she asks me a science question, I try not to just answer it. I’ll say, “What do you think?” or “How could we figure that out?”
It sounds simple, but it changes the whole feeling. Now she’s not trying to guess what I want to hear. She’s thinking out loud.
Practical Ways to Shift the Balance
If you’re a parent or teacher, you don’t need to wait for the district to rewrite the curriculum. There are small, low-effort ways to bring this into everyday life.
When a worksheet comes home, don’t just ask, “Did you finish it?” Ask, “What part was interesting?” or “What do you think about that?” If the answer is “nothing,” that’s information. It means the material isn’t connecting.
Use what’s already around you. Dinner is a great science moment. Why does bread toast? Why does fruit ripen faster in a paper bag? You don’t need a lesson plan. You just need to notice the question out loud.
And when you don’t know the answer, say it. “I’m not sure—let’s see if we can find out” is one of the most powerful sentences you can say to a child. It shows them that science isn’t about already knowing. It’s about figuring things out.
It’s Not About the Perfect Curriculum
I don’t think there’s a single magic curriculum that will make every kid love science. Some kids will always prefer reading to experiments. Some will love the vocabulary. That’s fine.
But I do think we’ve gotten the balance wrong. We’ve leaned so hard into measurable outcomes—tests, definitions, standards—that we’ve squeezed out the parts of science that actually make it exciting. Discovery. Surprise. The satisfaction of figuring something out through your own effort.
My daughter still has that weather test coming up. I’ll still help her study the definitions, because that’s what the school is asking for. But after the test, I’m not going to quiz her on the terms. I’m going to ask her what she saw outside today, and what she wonders about.
That might not get her a perfect score. But it might get her thinking like a scientist. And honestly, in the long run, that matters more than any worksheet.
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