Apologia General….supply kit or not?

We didn’t buy it last year and we didn’t get the labs done. This year, we bought it and we will begin labs this week.

I think it is worth it if you don’t want to drive around looking for things you need. Some of the things you have to still gather like purple cabbage, but the course suggesting freezing some for the other 2 labs that require it (which we are doing). The other things not included truly are things you have like a rubberband.

I think I paid $75 for both this kit and the astronomy one. I bought ours at Homesciencetools.com

I don’t know if they are cheapest, but our butterfly larvae (for littles) died twice in transit b/c of the heat and both times homesciencetools customer service was fabulous and sent free replacements. Still no butterfly larvae b/c we are going to wait until it cools off, but they are going to yet again send them to us (3rd time’s the charm we hope).

All of that to say I recommend the above site b/c of their customer service and they sent a very detailed list and it all came nicely packaged and labeled. I don’t know of others, but I’m sure you can find them other places too. HTH

We did Apologia General Science last year. I bought the kit, and was VERY glad that I did! I agree with Bookworm in that the supplies aren’t necessarily “exotic” or hard to find. However, having everything (except for perishables, like LDIMOM mentioned) collected in one place, in baggies labeled for each module, made it so easy to actually get the labs done. In fact, I could be working with my other 2 children and my ds 14 could just do the labs on his own sometimes.

If you have the time to prepare all your necessary materials ahead of time each week, or have budget concerns, you can manage without the kit. But if you need the time for other things and can swing the $60 or $70 dollars for the kit I think it is worth it. (I ordered mine from CBD, and they have a coupon for free shipping on homeschool stuff right now).

Misty, I agree with you that, in most cases, my kids sort of “knew” what the results of each experiment would be. In fact, that was an argument my son used several times to get out of doing the lab!

But, as a college science major myself, I thought that the discipline of performing the experiment AND writing up the lab was important to learn and follow through on. I admit that writing up labs was one of my least favorite things to do in college, but after I graduated and working in a research laboratory, I was glad I had that background because I needed to write up my experiments, and those write ups were an important part of published papers for my boss–since I did the work, she allowed me to write up the Materials and Methods sections of the papers. This gave me authorship credit, which was great! Just a small point that might matter to someone with a child interested in pursuing a science degree and career.

What does a lab report look like?  We did many of the labs but didn’t do any report.  Could you maybe.. amcampbell4.. give me an example of what it would look like.  I think my going into 8th grader, physical science could do those this year!

Misty, we purchased the Knowledge Box Central lapbook for General Science. $5 e-download and well worth it so far. It has notebooking pages, which my sons needs to study by, and lab reports (two styles: totally blank excepting the major outline of hypothesis, etc., etc. conclusion) or a lab report partially filled out with supply list already done (this is blank on the blank one). Wow, this isn’t coming out right but the download is more than 600 pages, and I printed about half of it! So much that I had to make DS’s book into two spiral bound books.

I am trying to spend a bit of my budget on these things that will hopefully supplement and ecnourage (DC) and provide a study tool as well. And the lab kit for me has so far been well worth the money. Just in module 1 though.

I also purchased the lapbook from Knowledge Box Central, and I’m wondering how much of it to print off — it is huge!! Anyone have any thoughts about what is the most useful part of it?

I think I will have my 13 and 14 yo gather supplies for the experiments now and put them into ziplocs to be ready to go.