Tonight Eddie Haskell walked past Ubergeek who was standing by the bar in the kitchen checking his fantasy football scores and casually asked, "Daddy, what's a hypothesis?" "What did you say Eddie?" UberGeek replied, making Eddie repeat himself, thinking he had heard something wrong. Eddie Haskell asked about the hypothesis again. UberGeek peered at me, and I looked open mouthed at Eddie. Then I told Eddie it was an idea you thought you had the answer for already but needed to prove. Eddie looked back at me as if to say, "Yeah, I thought you people were not too bright, but this proves it; that makes no sense at all." I told him that I would find a better way to explain it then I went straight to Google.
Thankfully, PBS and their helpful website, anticipates 3-6 year olds asking this question, apparently their viewers spawn a lot of future Mensa members. I really want to know what happened to five year olds asking whether they can eat the kind of paste that comes out of a jar, is applied with a stick and smells good enough to eat?? Isn't that the kind of question we should be supplying answers to at this age? I like my kids being smart but sometimes I anticipate that they will be laughing at their poor dim witted mother by the time they enter high school. I don't think I was asking what a hypothesis was at the age of 5; I am going to call my mom tomorrow and ask, seriously. I could read but that was because I was raised by two bookworms and it really was self preservation.
PBS suggested that we explain the concept by letting the kids mix two different types of food coloring, guessing the outcome and then writing it down. Thus explaining their guess as the hypothesis and the mixed color as the result. We are always up for a learning challenge and it would kill 15 minutes after bath time so we got out the food color and some clear glasses. We tried a better explanation, that a hypothesis was a guess you could test and that we were going to test some.
I never would have imagined that two five year olds would so easily grasp hypotheses but they did. We proved and disproved several and they enjoyed figuring out which mixtures turned into the colors they predicted/hypothesized. Still, I was glad that after we finished they were back to kicking a blow up beach ball around the house, a decidedly less intellectual pursuit.
