We just finished science for the 2017 school year. This is the fourth year in a row that we have used Apologia’s Elementary science, and we’re still loving it. This year, we used Exploring Creation With Astronomy. I thought Jeanne Fulbright wrote great books before—but in this 2nd Edition she outdid herself! This was a very fascinating course. I’m glad I decided to buy the new book instead of borrowing the old one from a friend.
Since our school year began in February, we have traveled through the solar system and beyond. We began with a quick overview of astronomy and the solar system, and then took more in-depth looks at the Sun and each planet, as well as the moon. There was also a chapter on Space Rocks, tucked in between Mars and Jupiter. The section about the Asteroid Belt was especially fascinating to me; the hypothesis presented for the existence of the asteroids sure made sense to us! The second-to-last chapter was also very fascinating for me, as it presented information that has been discovered recently, so it was all new for me. I think it’s rather sad that Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet, but it was very interesting to learn about such things. The Kuiper Belt, too, was new to me—and so interesting! The last chapter talked about stars and space travel.
As we have done before, I bought the notebooking journals to use with the textbook. We get a lot more out of the course by using these workbooks. Every day as we read, the boys narrate a sentence or two (or more, if they enjoyed the section) about what they learned, and there are activities to do as you go through each of the chapters. Each chapter has anywhere from one to three minibooks to make, to help with review, and there is also a vocabulary activity. We liked the way the 2nd edition notebooking journal was laid out much better than the others we have used. Instead of having to find the pages for the minibooks in the back, they were right in each lesson, where we needed them. Also, these activities were interspersed with other things in the lesson, rather than always at the end. The book was a bit more attractive, too.
We didn’t do all the activities, but some that we did were great fun. Probably the most memorable was the time we made a “scale model” of the distances in the solar system if the sun were the size of a dime—so incredible!
As always, I highly recommend Apologia’s science! We love that God and His Word are honored all the way through, and we enjoy the very interesting way in which facts are presented.
You can see pictures of a couple of our projects from this course here and here.
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