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Apologia scheduling
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We are using Zoology 2: Sea Creatures. I was following a 2-day/week schedule (so we could alternate with history), but the lessons seem so long! It had us do an experiment with the lab write-up page, ocean boxes, and notebooking all in one day…I think it took us 3 lessons plus a bit of time over the weekend! It also seems their attention is best for the first half of the lesson.
I think we need to switch over to 4-5 days/week schedule so we can have nice short lessons. I’m just afraid it will be difficult to fit in each day. How do you have it scheduled?
We just finished that book today! We did it 4 days a week, for 20 to 25 minutes at a time. We’d just find a ‘natural’ stopping place and pick it up the next day. For reference, my boys are 12, 12, 8 and 6.
I always struggled getting a full Apologia book done in a year’s time….usually ended up vamping things up at years end to finish. And we didn’t do all experiments and notebooking. We did experiments w/a co-op….it was helpful to me to not have to regularly do them. Maybe you could occasionally have a Friday experiment day and do a few experiments at a time? Good luck:) Gina
Because I didn’t buy the notebooks for this text for my dc (we had some printables) we didn’t have the schedule that is in the front cover of the book, somewhere. I didn’t realize there were schedules in the book or I would’ve bought them for that reason alone! Instead, I found a lesson outline (well, sort of) at donna young’s website for this book and have made my schedule using it. I looked through the lessons we have yet to complete and gave the amount I thought we could accomplish (natural stopping point, as well) a number for each day. It’s taking us awhile to get through it but I know exactly where to start and stop. That has been helpful to keep the lessons short. The notebooking/experiment days are separated out as I know my dc couldn’t do both on the same day. When all goes right, it takes us about 9 days to cover one lesson, but that was better than not knowing where to start/stop and being overwhelmed. You could certainly do more than we’re doing in one day, but this is what works for us, for now.
My dc do nature study, co-op science classes, and such, so this is extra. My middle boy loves sea creatures so I don’t mind us taking our time and reading some fun books in between.
HTH
We do Apologia 5 days/week! Last year, my kids finished the book early on that schedule, but otherwise the days will be very long. I’m actually really surprised the outline only shows 2 days/week.
I was going to mention that the table of contents would’ve worked out just as good, but more paper would’ve been used. The sheets from DY’s site are just more user friendly and and condensed.
Hope that makes sense.
Thanks for the suggestions. It seems you are all doing shorter lessons! We had a short lesson yesterday and it went well.
We are finishing up the insects portion of Flying creatures, then we’ll go back and cover birds. I don’t know how they could realistically be covered only 2x per week in only 2 lessons per week. My older son(11 yo 6th grader) is reading it on his own about 2-3 pages a day about 3-4x week to get through a chapter in 2 weeks. I’m reading it with our younger son (8 yo 3rd grader) about 5x a week in order to try to arrive at the experiments at the same time as the older so we can do those together. Younger ds is getting bored of insects I think. We only have one and a half lessons to finish, so hopefully he’ll hang in there. We have Swimming Creatures and plan to start it whenever we finish this one (Mid January I think?).
We are using Swimming Creatures this year as well. I also had it scheduled 2 days a week and ended up changing it to every day. We are actually not doing the ocean box or notebooking…and only selected labs (my kids are doing hands-on science at co-op). Instead we are doing lapbooks, so we read/lapbook each day. The kids love it!
@pinkchopsticks, that sounds like something we should’ve done (read, lapbook). I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Would you mind giving a link of where you found your lapbooking pages for your lapbook??
Well Thank you Ladies for helping me see that I’m NOT crazy! I have been struggling through this for six weeks now and am still on lesson 2! We should be starting lesson 3 tomorrow, but we haven’t done the last two experiments and I really don’t think the content is sticking. It takes so long to read the sections that there isn’t time for them to do the notebooking journals. I must also confess that it’s at the end of our day and I start to fall asleep trying to read to the kids. It is definitely too much reading for a two day schedule. I too had thought the two day/week schedule would work for me…that’s really all we had time for, but now I don’t know what ot do. Our days are already so full. Would Answers in Genesis be a better option with less reading (shorter lessons) so the kids can get to the hands on activities. This is the other thing, I believe most of our curricula are heavy into writing. I’m beginning to think it’s just too much, especially for my 8 year old…..Also, is the narration of each section the method of testing? Do any of you do traditional tests? If not, how do you grade for Science…I know grading isn’t the CM way, but I wanted to keep a record just in case it would be needed.
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