Homeschooling

We have finally finished our science course for the year. It was very hard to get in time for science this year, with the crazy schedules we had all year, and a lot of time off school for one reason or another. Toward the end of the year, after several of the boys finished some subjects and I had more time, we were able to do lessons more often. I have thoroughly enjoyed our study this year, of Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day. I am greatly enjoying getting an in-depth look at various topics from a strongly Christian, Creationist point of view. Jeannie K. Fulbright has done an excellent job with this book, as with the other books we’ve used that she wrote.

The lessons in this book cover aquatic animals in general and the oceans, whales, seals and sea cows, aquatic herps (reptiles and amphibians), primeval reptiles such as plesiosaurs, fish, sharks and rays, crustaceans, mollusks, cephalopods like squids and octopuses, echinoderms (sea stars and sea urchins), cnidarians like jellyfish and coral, and other aquatic animals such as sponges, worms, and some microscopic creatures. We learned a lot of very fascinating facts! I think this was the most interesting book from this series yet, for us, since we live very near the ocean and have seen many of the creatures covered in the book. In fact, a few days before we did the lesson on octopuses, a couple of my boys found an octopus among the rocks at the edge of the sea!

The favorite part of this book appears to have been the very last lesson we read. It was about microscopic creatures, specifically rotifers and tardigrades. That was apparently the most intriguing thing for a couple of my sons! Another of the boys remembered quite a few things. He enjoyed learning the difference between true seals and eared seals; we have eared seals in our area. He also liked learning about the sizes of some of the giants of the sea, such as manta rays and leatherback turtles. Another favorite topic for him was symbiosis, the way various animals work together to live, such as clownfish and sea anemones. He also mentioned being fascinated with the Man O’War, which is actually a colony of several animals!

As we have done other years, I purchased the notebooking journals that go with this book. They cost a fair bit, but they really help me organize our study. As we read each section of the lesson (which takes us about four days of reading together to get through), I have the boys write a sentence or two about what they learned in that section. After we finish the reading, each of them creates a mini book from pages provided in the back of the notebook, writing down information about the various animals and topics covered in the lesson. I do the writing for most of the boys, because they struggle so much with it and will come up with a lot more if they don’t have to do the mechanical part of the writing. There are also copywork pages for each lesson, vocabulary exercises, and usually a crossword puzzle for the older children. The junior notebooking journal has other activities to review vocabulary. There is also a page of review questions in the older book. There are book suggestions for most lessons to expand the study, but our libraries here don’t have many, if any, of the books. There are also suggested experiments, and you are supposed to build a diorama of an underwater scene as you go through the entire book. We don’t do a lot of those activities, though. Especially this year, we were struggling to just read the book and do the review! If we had more time, it would be fun to do more.

I highly recommend Apologia’s Young Explorers Series. This is the best science course I have come across. It will take something pretty amazing to lure us away from using these books! I love being able to learn fascinating facts along with my sons. We also love the way the author honors God and shows His design in the way the animals are made and act.

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!

Sometime last year, I wrote a post about this book, but I decided to share the review I just finished writing of it here anyway. I love Apologia!

For about 10 years, we used Sonlight Curriculum for our science. It was all right, but we didn’t love it. Two years ago, I discovered Apologia’s Young Explorer Series and was able to get some of the textbooks used, to take a good look at them. One look was all it took to convince me that these books were a better fit for our family than what we had been doing.

The first Apologia elementary science textbook we used was Exploring Science With Human Anatomy and Physiology. Looking back, I’m not sure I’d recommend starting with that one. It goes into a lot of depth and is more advanced than some of the other books. I used it with four of my boys, ages 14, 12, 10, and 8. The 10-year-old loved it; the 12-year-old had decided before we ever started that he would hate it, and couldn’t back down. I loved it! I learned a lot, myself. For example, I just opened the book at random and found where it talked about growth plates. Your long bones, such as in your arms and legs, have growth plates close to the end, where new bone is added to make you grow. Of course, once you are full-grown, these growth plates fill in with solid bone. If you are injured at a growth plate when you are young, that bone may stop growing and you may end up with one leg or arm shorter than the other! Right after we read that part of the lesson, we ate chicken for dinner, and one of my sons discovered a growth plate in a leg bone. Science at the dinner table!

Each of the 14 lessons in the book has around 15 pages of engagingly-written information about the topic for that chapter—bones or cells or respiratory system, etc—and then a few pages of activities to help cement the information in the children’s minds. The author recommends making a notebook to go along with the textbook, and taking notes as each chapter is read. There are also review questions in the last section of each lesson and an experiment to illustrate a point from the lesson. Throughout the book, you will be given instructions in making a “personal person”–a picture of a person, to which are added more and more layers as you go through the book. Each layer will be a different body system, such as the skeleton, the circulatory system, the respiratory system, and so on. Each lesson should take about two weeks to work through.

To go along with the textbook, Apologia offers Notebooking Journals. They have one for older children and one for grades 1-2. I used them to go along with this course, and found them to be very useful. At the beginning of each lesson, there are a couple of pages on which to take notes or draw pictures of what is being taught. I always read the textbook aloud, and at the end of each section (1/2-2 pages) I have each of the children write a sentence about what I read. After we have finished the reading for the lesson, we answer the review questions, which are in the notebook. There are also crossword puzzles for the vocabulary words in each lesson, which we don’t use because they are too much for my dyslexic sons, and handwriting pages with a Scripture verse that goes along with the topic of the lesson. Then, there is a page on which to glue a mini-book about the topic of the lesson (the pieces to put together for the mini-book are in the back of the notebook). The children write what they have learned from the lesson in the mini-book. There are also a few pages of suggestions for further study, such as books or DVDs, and other activities and investigations you can do. The Junior Notebooking Journal contains most of these features, with a few changes to make them simpler for younger children. Instead of the crossword puzzle, there is usually a cut-and-paste activity for vocabulary, and there are coloring pictures at the beginning of each lesson.

One of my favorite aspects of Apologia’s Science is the way God is honored! For the past several years, one of my sons had been asking me if this or that was true, in the Usborne books we were using. I had to tell him, every so often, that no, this part is not true. In Exploring Creation With Human Anatomy and Physiology, I never had to say that! Over and over throughout the book, the author points to God’s wonderful design for our bodies. I can’t recommend this book highly enough! Oh, one more thing I liked. The last chapter is titled “Growth and Development.” Even though it talks about the development of the embryo and growth of a baby in the womb, and about genetics, the author does not discuss how a baby is made. There was absolutely nothing in that chapter that I did not want to read to my young boys.