Adding nature study and living books to high school science textbook with labs

Apologia Physical Science didn’t take my kids nearly that many hours to complete.  It took them 30-45 minutes per day, 5 days a week, for about 32 weeks. (My kids may be faster workers than some other kids, though.)

However, you don’t have to have 180 hours.  There are several ways to calculate time for high school courses, one of which is simply to complete a high school level textbook or program.  It doesn’t matter if it takes them 90 hours or 220, completing the textbook or program counts as one year.    If you don’t have a standard text or program, then you want to add up hours spent as a rough estimate of total amount of learning.   Most high school courses only require 120-150 hours, that way, though.   I don’t think any public high school in the country requires 180 hours, though I see it recommended sometimes for home schoolers.   Often, a high school “hour” is closer to 45 or 50 minutes, and then there are assemblies and such that take up many days as well.   I wouldn’t try to push for 180 hours–that’s going to be overwhelming.

What I usually have done with my kids (we didn’t do much SCM with the older ones–I’m not even sure it was around back then, as my oldest is now 24–was to use a basic text as the essential, “you have to get this done to get the credit” thing.  Then I could add more if I wanted to, without feeling the pressure of counting it carefully. They were just “extras” we did, and they counted in that general topic, but I didn’t tally them carefully.  (Some states require a more careful tallying of hours, but mine doesn’t.)    Things like the Physics 101 videos can easily be assigned as “homework,” and the nature study days can be something you just do, without having to tie it in perfectly.  It’s ok to have loose associations in some places.    You will talk about some thing that are in your physical science when you do nature walks, because it covers things like rivers and parts of earth science, and those will also be observed. It doesn’t have to fit perfectly to still be relevant.

I have never counted these things as separate on a transcript.  For one thing, I want my transcripts to look comprehensible to the average person reading them. If they see, “Physical Science,” they know just about what that means.   If they see a credit for that, plus a half credit for nature study, plus a quarter credit for videos, they start to think, “this transcript doesn’t make any sense.”

I did give my kids honors credits for things they did that went above and beyond the average, which all Apologia sciences certainly do.