Physical Science (Charlotte Mason)

Charlotte Mason believed science begins in the child’s own kitchen, on the trail, beside the stream — not on the textbook page. That conviction runs through every week of this nine-week physical science program. Your seventh grader will read living-book passages written like a knowledgeable friend telling stories, narrate what they understood in their own words, observe the same phenomena firsthand wherever possible, and only then reach for the formal vocabulary and calculations. The aim is a child who has truly seen matter change, watched a pendulum swing, felt friction in their hands — and can talk about all three because they know them, not because they memorized definitions.

Week 1 opens at the kitchen counter with boiling water, dissolving salt, and a frying egg. Three small dramas, three different kinds of change. Week 2 picks up properties — density that makes a steel ship float, mineral hardness and luster that geologists have used by hand for a thousand years — built around the kind of observation that turns a stone into a story. Week 3 turns to forces: friction as the invisible hand that lets you walk and stops your bike, gravity as the law that pulls a leaf and a planet by the same rule. Week 4 looks at motion through living things and steady mechanisms — a cheetah’s stride, a heron’s wingbeat, the patient swing of a pendulum that tells Galileo something most people never noticed.

Energy, Transfer, Transformation (Weeks 5-7)

Week 5 introduces energy through a campfire and the food on a dinner plate, where potential energy converts to kinetic and heat through reactions that have warmed humans for as long as there have been humans. Your child learns to do basic KE = ½mv² calculations only after they’ve watched flames flicker and understood, in their bones, what energy actually is. Week 6 traces how energy moves — conduction through a cast-iron skillet, convection in a kitchen and a thunderstorm, radiation from the sun and the fire — using passages on cooking and on how sound finds its way through air, water, and solid earth. Week 7 follows energy as it changes form. A waterfall’s ledger keeps perfect track even as potential becomes kinetic becomes heat becomes sound. A blacksmith’s forge turns chemical energy into thermal into mechanical into shaped iron. The principle is conservation; the lesson is that energy is never lost, only renamed.

Observation as Discipline (Weeks 8-9)

Week 8 puts Michael Faraday at the head of the classroom. His Christmas lectures on the candle, delivered to a roomful of London children in 1860, are still the gold standard for how to look at one ordinary object and see chemistry, physics, energy transfer, and a great deal of beauty in the same flame. Your child reads Faraday narrating what he sees, learns to do the same, and confronts the hardest scientific habit of all — refusing to assume.

Week 9 closes the program with a capstone: two science narratives (“The Blacksmith and the Blade,” “The River That Never Stops Teaching”) that pull the entire course back together. Your child evaluates claims, designs their own observation, and writes a final narration that draws on matter, force, motion, energy, and transfer as a single connected understanding of the physical world.

Every week includes living-book passages, narration prompts, copywork, hands-on observation suggestions, and full answer keys with teaching notes for the adult reading alongside.