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CM Style High School Chemistry – Driving me nuts!
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Chemistry is our Science this year! We approach it at the high school level and my younger one participates fully but there are no high school expectations for him. I say that just to explain that we do this subject together.
Here’s my frustration … for the first time I’m approaching this Science in a totally CM way – living books, experiments, etc – and it is driving me nuts! I don’t feel like we have a good scaffold for it; no framework. I feel like we are being introduced to A LOT but I really do not like how it feels sort of random and less organized than a textbook. I feel sort of lost myself and kind of wishing I had a better smoother succession of ideas. I’m having trouble composing their term 1 exam questions in an organized fashion too.
Has anyone felt this way with a high school Science and how did you overcome it? Should I scrap this method when term 1 ends and go back to my CM-ish ways with Science? I have previously taught Science with a textbook, labs and then had an extensive living book reading list in addition. I guess it’s the lack of structure with the main book being a living book that has me thrown for a loop. I’m not a Science major, but I do love it and am a generally curious person. Chemistry is complicated and I’m feeling like we didn’t start at the beginning and sequentially move forward with all these living books! Sure we’ve got LOTS of knowledge but I feel like I need a list of concepts for a solid understanding of Chemistry and then a list of living books that taught or illustrated that concept. Yes, typing that I realize – that is really what I want! Anyone have anything like that? 😉
Any advice would be dandy!! Thanks.
Have you looked into The 101 series? We are enjoying the Physics DVDs this year and they would give you a framework.
We would not have been able to do Chemistry without a textbook as our base and my son had to do it on his own. We used The Great Courses Chemistry dvd/workbook combo along with labs taught twice a month for two hours (4 hours total). My son then read Michael Faraday’s book The Chemical History of a Candle and he chose something from How the Cookie Crumbles and bios from another book weekly (can’t remember the title).
HTH
We are using plans from the link below. It is a mix of text book days and other resources. We are also using The You Tube videos of the periodic table put out by a college in the UK.
http://hubpages.com/education/chemistry-for-high-schoolers
Thanks everyone. The last link looks a lot like what we’re doing. Don’t get me wrong – I do love the variety and the living books. It is that over arching framework that I’m wishing I could find outside of the textbook world.
We had apologia’s text as well and did plan to use it, but my son really needed the lecture portion, or maybe I needed him to have it, that came with the text from great courses.
You can always use some sort of textbook for the framework and some extras, like bios and YouTube, to add life to it.
Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry by Bernard Jaffe was the other book we used for bios. Of course there are tons of biographies to read but this has a variety of them in one book?
I haven’t looked too much at the HS portion but Science Scope is like a giant checklist of all goals to meet in each area of science for each set of grades. It is quite detailed and explanatory. It is by Kathryn Stout and you can get it for a penny plus shipping off amazon.
Claire,
I scrapped dd15’s living books based chemistry. She begged not to have to do labs all year bc she is doing the Landry Chemistry Intensive (today and tomorrow actually). She liked some of the books, but was feeing scattered, too. We looked at options and she chose DIVE Chemistry with the internet text. She can watch and not do the labs and do a lab notebook with it. Thus far, she is much happier with it. Is it CM? No, but I’m accepting that the perfect CM paradigm may not be perfect for us all the time.
I took some time over Thanksgiving and found a TOC to look over in a text to see if we were following any logical pattern to our lessons! Happily, we were not totally popping around randomly from topic to topic. I still feel a little burdened to create the main lessons but that’s ok.
Just to follow up ….
We found a happy medium with our CM style Chemistry this year. I found a textbook that gave us the structure and the chronological order we lacked with a “living book + labs” only curriculum.
I took the living book list and made it an independent reading assignment 2 days a week. They roll from book to book on the list. They should each finish 3/4 significant books this way. They narrate each reading.
For the other part of Chemistry, I take the text and digest it first then we introduce the concept together and practice/experience/dive into it 4 days a week. Originally we only did 2 days a week of this type thing and 2 days of the living books, but it seemed like we needed a bit more so this spring we kicked up our game a notch. The labs we are still doing as they fit into the topics that come up in either aspect of what we are studying.
Maybe not the most hands off way of doing it but for us it works because we like Science together. It won’t happen after this year. They’ll be totally independent but I think we’ve gotten a lot out of not jumping too fast in to completely independent lessons.
@HollyS Did you use the 101 dvd Series alone or as a supplement. I have read mixed things on whether they stand as a course or a supplement.
I already purchased them.
Julie, I recommend that you use the 101 series as a supplement. They are not complete high school level courses.
Here are my comments/review from 5 years ago on Biology 101:
I watched the Biology 101 videos and took the time to read through the study guide and accreditation booklet to see how they compared to a typical high school biology course.
A typical high school biology course will cover such topics as cell biology, cell division, very basic genetics, single-celled organisms, invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants. Lessons on invertebrates and vertebrates will include information on the different systems of the body and the general habits of organisms in each group. Usually a few specific organisms will be used to represent the group. For instance, earthworms are usually used to relate information about one type of invertebrate. Lessons on plants will include photosynthesis, absorption and transportation of water, growth, and reproduction.
Biology 101 touched on many of the same topics but did not go into any detail. For instance, a typical biology course will cover fungi by relating information on how they reproduce, how they grow, and what they do. Biology 101 mentions fungi by naming some different types of fungi. There is no information on how they grow or reproduce. Though other topics contain a bit more detail than fungi in Biology 101, most information given is only surface information and is not in-depth enough to be considered high school level.
When compared to the scope of topics covered in a couple other popular homeschool biology courses, Biology 101 covered only a fraction of the contents.
Biology 101 comes with a study guide and an accreditation booklet. The study guide does provide some additional information that is not given on the videos, but still doesn’t give the in-depth information that is needed to make this a high school level course. The accreditation booklet gives ideas for activities to do and tells you how much time to count towards a high school credit. It does not tell you which other books to read or what other videos to watch.
A few of the activities were good, but many were quite a stretch for the number of hours you would record for credit. Some examples:
Go fishing, catch a fish, and identify its external parts. The whole three hours for fishing is counted for credit.Go out to lunch or dinner and classify the items on the restaurant table. The whole two hours for the meal is counted for credit.Identify 10 plants in your yard. This is considered two hours of lab work.There was also some unintentional misinformation given in the videos. Some people might consider these minor, but details like these are important because they could be misunderstood. A few examples:
Skunks, raccoons, and bears are labeled as carnivores, but they are omnivores.When covering metamorphosis, a picture of a monarch caterpillar is shown, then a picture of a monarch chrysalis, but the butterfly shown is not a monarch. They are never labeled as monarch, but the sequence somewhat implies it.When covering birds, the host mentions American goldfinches but shows a picture of a bird that is not an American goldfinch.In summary, I found the videos suitable for the whole family to watch, or as supplements to other material, but they were a bit lacking in detail to be considered high school material.
I have also watched parts of Chemistry 101 and read the accompanying study guide and accreditation booklet. Just like Biology 101, Chemistry 101 gives more surface information instead of the more in-depth information given in a textbook like Dr. Wile’s Discovering Design with Chemistry. Many of the activities in the accreditation booklet were similar in “style” to the ones mentioned above in my comments on Biology 101.
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