Do you have to use the notebooks with the Apologia Elementary science books?

The Apologia science program has a yahoo group (I don’t remember the name, I’m no longer a member of it) and there are some free notebooking type pages for most of the books on the Yahoo group.

I don’t use the notebooks.  There are some free notebooking pages available on the “extras” page (in the book introduction).  I print what I want and leave the rest.  We do mainly narration and illustration for each section I read, and then we record the experiments/extras we do (i.e. I took a picture of the solar system model we did when we did Astronomy and they put it in their notebooks). I don’t think it is lame to keep it simple.

I’m not sure, but I think the pages on the yahoo group are the same as on the course website.

Just wanted to chime in to say that we have used Apologia for years with just narration – no notebooks. I did order them one year, but it was way too much busy work for our family. As the other ladies mentioned, you can download a lot of the material from the forum if you would like to use it. Each chapter of the text ends with discussion questions and an easy experiment to cement the lesson in thier minds.

The kids had thier first science ‘class’ this year and thier teacher was amazed by how much of the reading they were retaining – and our son won the science project competition (his very first science project :)! So I would say your kids can learn every bit as much from just going through the text with narration and the science projects.

We don’t use the additional notebooks.  We use the notebook suggestions in the book (they are at the end of each chapter) and sometimes use the free printable pages.  I believe you can find these on the additional resources website (there are directions to get there in the book’s introduction).  These pages are designed to work with the suggestions in the textbook.  I think it is plenty of notebooking…we’d get overwhelmed with daily notebooking.  There is one or two notebooking options for each chapter…usually one for older DC and one for younger DC.

As far as narration, we follow the suggestions in the book.  At the end of each few sections, there is a narration topic.  We usually hit one of these each lesson…I follow a plan with daily readings (I think it was from the Yahoo group).  At the end of the chapter we go through the discussion questions…usually the same day we do the notebook page and/or experiment.

We also don’t cover all the experiments or notebook pages.  I try to fit in what we can’t and move on when we don’t have time (or I don’t feel up to gathering all the materials).    I’ve found I’m more consistent getting science in when I’m not dreading complicated experiments or putting it off until I get to the store.