[From many - one.]

This may seem heretical but I'm actually not all that much in favor of teaching science in elementary school.
All too often, no, make that almost always, "science" is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized.

The magic goes away. No one's fault really. People wouldn't be elementary school teachers if they themselves had been caught up in the excitement of real science.

[Ichneumon]

This may seem heretical but I'm actually not all that much in favor of teaching science in elementary school. All too often, no, make that almost always, "science" is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized. The magic goes away. No one's fault really. People wouldn't be elementary school teachers if they themselves had been caught up in the excitement of real science.

Something along the lines of Isaac Asimov's essays on science (e.g., those in collections like "The Stars in Their Courses", "The Relativity of Wrong", etc.) would be a *great* science curriculum, especially for gradschool level, since they focus not on math and analysis, but on the nature of scientific discovery.

They're little snapshots of how various discoveries in science were first suspected, then thought of, then investigated, tested, and validated. They read like exciting detective stories (because in a way, they are), and in the process give a marvelous understanding of how and why the scientific method accomplishes things, weeds out error, and uncovers real knowledge.

A great deal of my love of science is due to reading Asimov's essays as a child.

Also the essay "The Relativity of Wrong" should be required reading by all confused IDers/AECreationists. It nails one of their most frequent fallacies (the notion that if a theory isn't 100% correct, then it's 100% wrong). We see this fallacy from the creationists again and again, especially in their comments implying that everything in science routinely gets thrown entirely out the window every generation or so to be replaced with something entirely different (in fact, most of past paradigms are still standing, albeit with later refinements), and their strange belief that if they can identify even one minor flaw or unresolved question in evolution, then they've destroyed the entire theory. This fallacy is also involved when they think that scientists changing a minor detail the vast body of evolutionary biology (e.g. where exactly a given species sprang from in the tree of life) shows that science "doesn't really know anything" or is some kind of "complete rewrite" of evolutionary biology, etc.

[Quark2005]

This may seem heretical but I'm actually not all that much in favor of teaching science in elementary school. All too often, no, make that almost always, "science" is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized.

The magic goes away.

I understand your point - I was lucky enough to have some good teachers at that age that totally mesmerized me with science, though; shaped the future path of my career. Kids that age might be better serviced by a specialist science teacher who floats from classroom to classroom, showing up a few times a week to really show kids the "interesting" side of science with experiments, etc. (Such things cost $$, though, unfortunately...)

[shuckmaster]

teaching science in elementary school. All too often, no, make that almost always, "science" is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized.

Actually, most elementary level science teaching is a variety of lab experiments and usually very exciting to young students compared to say math or spelling which is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized.