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Does anyone NOT like Elem. Apologia?
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I didn’t love the Elementary Apologia. It was too dry and inserted seemingly random facts. I almost felt like there was too much information and so she would just throw in facts that needed a whole lot more info and time. For the last three or four years I let my child pick a different animal/weather/anatomy topic and study it for the week. At the end of the week the child would draw a picture and narrate everything learned. The year we did animals I was shocked by the amount of in-depth info the kids knew about 36 different animals!
This year I am participating in a science co-op. I am teaching 2nd-4th grade and using the Land Animals Apologia book. After going through it today I realized that she touched on a few things for each animal, but nothing in-depth. So… I’ve planned to only cover about 5 pages a week, add some activities about the specific animals, some hands on lapbooking, and a living book about each type of animal. By the end of the year in addition to completing the actual textbook, we plan to cover at least three or four living books and experiments.
So… if you like the basic ideas used in the Apologia, go for it… BUT I would certainly use it as a jumping off point, not a complete study.
This has been a great discussion. I’m also rather relieved that I’m not the only one who has discovered Apologia just isn’t doing it for our family. I was concerned, too, about the Zoology books because I just couldn’t imagine only talking about “Flying Creatures” for a whole year before being able to move on to some other kind of animal. So, after reading all the posts over the last couple of days and doing lots more research AND asking the kids what they’d like to learn about in science this year (which was really funny – I thought they’d have this big list between them or completely disparate ideas but in about a minute they said animals and plants and keep on with astronomy. Well OK then!) I have made some decisions.
I really like the looks of Real Science 4 Kids. I will use these somehow, some way. I really appreciated being able to look at every single page of the book, the teacher’s guide, and the workbook. Thanks for the info Heather (btw, love the pic on your blog!).
I very nearly went with some of the Sonlight science, but then came back to this forum and looked at old posts about science. And I decided to check out Answers in Genesis – God’s Design. I thought I had looked at it before, but I think I didn’t look too closely. I’m about 98% sure that this is what we’re going to go with, adding in some other books here and there. Since I have a 4th grader and a 1st grader and don’t want to do science separately (THEY don’t want to do science separately, lol) this program looks pretty great for being able to reach both kids at their own level. This was really important to me. It’s also pretty cheap, relatively speaking.
What I was afraid of (in looking for a science curric) was that the material would be too vague or “dumbed down” and too much like what I had in public school. That’s one reason I thought Apologia would be good – the amount of material. But now I see that other curriculums can be just as vigorous and in-depth without taking a whole year to cover one single topic. I also want to add that I wasn’t hugely impressed with the Apologia notebooks. I liked the extra project ideas for each chapter, but didn’t like quite a bit of the rest of the activities. This is just my $.02 AND I am looking at it from the perspective of a 1st grader’s mom. It might be better for the 4th grader, but I still don’t really see the educational value in the minibooks. That stuff really just seems like “cut and paste work” to me. Just my opinion – I know there are alot of you out there that love the notebooks and found them to work really well for your kids.
I want to thank every one of you who posted. All of your opinions were valuable to me and I really appreciated getting so much help in this area!
Blessings to you all,
Becky
Bringing this post back into discussion. We used Zoology 1 last year and plan to do Zoology 2 this year. I looked at “106 Days of Creation” but found I couldn’t even get half of the books from the library. It would have cost more than the Apologia by year end. So, I’m wondering if anyone has taken a child through the six Apologia Elementary books with joy and success? Or, anyone completely regret using Apologia?
When I first started homeschooling, I saw the author, Jeanne Fullbright at convention and bought zoology 3. I used it for grade 1 and a 4 yo tag along. I was so excited about it. They liked learning about ocean creatures and they made an ocean box as the book recommends and also a lapbook. We made it to only half the book when the excitement died down and they no longer wanted to do the lapbooks. So that is as far as we got in that book. Two years later, we tried Astronomy, not even making it halfway through it. My son, then in grade 3, said they were long and boring. It think there are too many facts on the same topic and a lot to take in at a young age. So I changed to living books and nature study only. I read aloud some picture books and they read science readers, including Christian Liberty Press Nature Readers. This last year, my son in grade 5 read the SCM living books for grades 4-6 and enjoyed those. I wanted him to enjoy science again before he hit the tougher Jr high books. He is interested in taking on an Apologia elementary book on his own next year.
So my conclusion is to use living books and nature study only through grade 3 or 4 and then possibly do some Apologia elementary a few years before Jr high General Science.
I’ll pop in and share our experiences. We love the Apologia elementary books BUT not for a group of kids at once. So what I mean is each of my children so far has reached a point where they literally take the Apologia books to bed with them to read and pour through once they are solid readers (and some non readers love the photos). We own all the books. We’ve done lots out of them in varying groups of kids. If it is a few kids close in age it works ok, but when my spread is from upper elementary clear down to Kindy it doesn’t always work as well.
Last year we switched to God’s Design for Science for our group science with all my kids but the oldest. (There is a 4 grade gap between oldest and next child, so last year she was in Apologia Physical Science and this year she’ll be doing Apologia Biology.) What we did last year was the Earth and Space books of God’s Design (blue books). I would gather the then 4ht, 3rd, 1st, K kids (and often the younger 3 boys gathered with us too) and read aloud the lesson, do any activity, and send them on their merry way. My older ones of that group could then grab the Apologia books or others from our shelves to go further if a topic caught their interest.
So this fall my oldest will be doing Apologia Biology. I’ll read the green life science books aloud to the rest of the kids for God’s Design for Science. Then children can dive deeper when it interests them using Apologia or other books. And every so often a child randomly curls up with an Apologia book for fun (the most recent example – the anatomy and physiology book has been exchanging hands between three of the boys on car rides to the zoo and other outings). And we love lots of living science books too, of course.
Interesting perspective Tristan, using Apologia for further reading. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Zoology 1 book. My daughter got bored with it at the end of the year but that was more due to already haven learned insects in PS last year. For the God’s Design series, do you purchase the teacher supplements and such or just the books themselves?
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