Where does the sun rise?

  Where does the sun rise? Does it keep changing its position? Is milk acidic? And what about apple juice and the curry from yesterday’s dinner? What does the caterpillar’s hair look like? And does the pollen look the same, fresh from the morning dew and in the evening? …A hundred questions to think about and to search for evidences, hundred ideas to communicate to friends and to debate with them! And a hundred questions to take to the teachers!

It is this process of inquiry supported by evidences collected from observation and experimentation that forms the soul of science. Developing this culture of science needs a fair amount of autonomy and initiative for children supported by the guiding, motivating spirit of the elders.

Jodo Gyan has devised a programme to support this process of learning the  methods of science, by devising a Personal Science Kit for upper primary and middle schools.

Such a personal kit can complement school science in many ways. It makes it possible to make observations that cannot be done easily during the normal space of a school such as locating the changing position of the rising sun using a compass. It also makes it possible to do some of the school experiments in totally different ways, such as using the litmus paper in the kitchen. But more importantly it provides a means by which an early intuitive feel and an   exploratory interaction with many of the phenomena of the world can take place. This can provide a basis on which later   more rigorous methods and deductive logic of science can grow naturally, to lead on to answering scientifically the `why’ questions of understanding the nature around us.