Exploring Creation With Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day–book review

This year, we used Zoology 1. Here is the review I just finished writing of it.

This is the second of Apologia’s elementary science books that we’ve used. We just finished it; last year we went through their Human Anatomy book. Several of my boys liked Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day a lot better than last year’s science. Apparently, birds, bats and insects are much more popular than the human body, among my sons!

I used Flying Creatures with five boys at once this year, ages 15, 13, 11, 9, and 5. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much the 5-year-old learned from this course! At the beginning of the year, he wasn’t remembering much of anything, but by the end of the year he was able to remember a fair amount from each lesson. His dictated narrations were longer and better as the year went on. 

Exploring Creation With Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day is divided into 14 lessons, each intended to take about two weeks to complete. We averaged a week and a half to two weeks, and that was a very comfortable pace. The first six lessons are about birds, including a lesson about flight which my sons found quite interesting. Lesson 7 is all about bats, lesson 8 is about flying reptiles (extinct), and the remaining six lessons are about insects of all types. Ever since we started learning about insects, my 3-year-old, who often listened in and looked at the beautiful color photos illustrating nearly every page of the textbook, has been bringing me insects and wanting to study them. 

This textbook is anything but dull and dry. The content is presented in an engaging, interesting way, with amazing facts about the various birds and insects sprinkled throughout. I loved going through it, and I just asked my 11-year-old if he had anything to say. He responded, “I loved it!” One thing we especially appreciated was the way God is honored all the way through this course. Before we discovered the elementary Apologia textbooks, we used a lot of Usborne books for science, and frequently I had to tell the boys that something wasn’t true. This especially bothered one of them, who then didn’t know whether to believe anything in the book we were reading. He hasn’t had that problem with Flying Creatures! We’re looking forward to working through Zoology 2 next year.

I purchased the Notebooking Journals to go along with the textbook. For me, they are very valuable. You could easily make your own by following the directions in the textbook at the end of each lesson, but for us it works best to have something preprinted. At the beginning of each lesson, the notebook has a couple of pages on which to take notes or draw pictures. I generally have each boy write a sentence about what he learned in each little section of the lesson as I read it aloud. After we’ve read the entire lesson, we answer the review questions. We don’t use the crossword puzzles for vocabulary practice, because of the dyslexia we have to work with, and we haven’t used the handwriting practice pages, because we had a different handwriting course. We almost always make the mini-books they provide as a final review for each lesson, however. They have been a good way to organize what we learned in the lesson. Each lesson also has a page or two of further activities for investigating the topic of the lesson, and suggested books or DVDs to go along with it. We were able to find a few of the suggested books in the library. 

I am very thankful to have found Apologia and look forward to continuing through their books!