Exploring Creation, Anatomy & Physiology – Anyone familiar?

Hi! We just finished this course. We actually switched to this because another curriculum recommended an Anatomy book that was waaaay too graphic in the sex department. This book does not deal with those sensitive issues at all. It just is not discussed – though every other major body system is dealt with in great detail.

The Jr. Apologia books are very comprehensive, written from a Godly point of view, and include easy and effective experiments. However, some folks think that they are difficult to read and a bit dry (as science books tend to be). We always use the texts as a base and supplement with lots of living science books. And you can always add a ‘special’ book on the sex thing when you are ready. We used the series of books from Focus on the Family.

Hope that helps!

We did this book with my oldest son the year before last-he was 10 at the time. It was our 3rd Apologia book in this series, and was my son’s favorite by far. It was challenging enough for him, but not so challenging that he couldn’t do a lot of it independently. We also purchased the notebook, but didn’t do every activity in it-my favorite part of the notebook was a section at the end of each chapter that suggested additional resources, (books, DVDs etc) for further exploration. Have fun! And feel free to ask me any specific questions that you may have! 🙂

I felt that some of the activities were busywork, yes. Even in the intro, the author makes note that one should not feel it necessary to do every single activity. I didn’t feel that it was too much writing for my son, but occasionally, he would dictate to me, and I would write for him. There is a vocabulary crossword puzzle for every lesson and a scripture copy work-we mostly skipped those unless he wanted to do them. In every lesson, there is a page or two for them to record Fascinating Facts from their reading and space to draw pictures,a What Do You Remember page (we did some of these orally), and there were various other activities like labeling the bones of a skeleton or drawing the parts of a cell. There is a page to detail any projects they did with that lesson-I always took pictures of the project, printed them, and stapled the pictures to that page.

I’ve never had the Jr Notebook, so I couldn’t compare them for you. I’ve also heard there is a Yahoo Group for this series that has lots of information and resources.

You definitely do not want to get the Jr. Notebook for the age of your children.  It has coloring pages and the lines are the big ones used for beginning writers – it doesn’t have the crossword puzzles either – which were very helpful for solidifying new terms (We have not done anatomy, but have used the guides for two of the other studies).  Each year I’ve bought a guide for each of my two oldest – a regular one for my older daughter who was 7 and then 8 and a jr. one for my younger daughter who was 5.5 and then 6.5 when starting the year.  This year I just bought ONE regular notebook, for the two of them to use.  We will not make copies of it (copyright violation), but rather one can fill in one page of “fascinating facts” and the other can fill in the other page.  They can work together on the crossword puzzles and we also do the review questions orally.  I can always use the free notebooking pages if there’s something they both want to do and there’s not enough pages in the notebook, but I found we weren’t using enough of the notebook to make it worth purchasing one for each child.  I may even just use the unused portion of our “used” notebooks when we go through the program again with my younger set!  There are lapbook components in the back of each book, so you could even have one do a lapbook book filling in facts and the other do the fascinating facts pages.

Just FYI – any day now Apologia is releasing their Chemistry and Physics young explorer text – you can download two chapters of it for free from their blog, but it has TONS of hands on actitivies and it might also be a good one for your boys.