We are currently doing God’s Design for Life (based on reviews from this forum) this year and my children enjoy it but I do have a few questions for those of you have used it.
Do your children do it independently, or do you read it together? The children I’m using it for range in age from 8-13.
Do you have them narrate the lesson? Do you have them do any of the activities or record main terms?
Do you schedule in any living books and if so how do you schedule them?
My thirteen-year-old is a little old for this but she doesn’t have much for a science base and I think she would really struggle with the Apologia General Science which I’ve used for an older child. Any suggestions for what I could use for her to add to this course or instead of?
We do it together. Yes, we narrate it. We do most of the activities. I use the questions over the terms as a kind of “quick review” the next day but we don’t really memorize them yet, although you could have your oldest do that. We do lots of related books–I usually just turn the kids loose at the library and they bring home stacks of stuff, and when a scientist is mentioned, we go get a biography of him to read, so I don’t really schedule, we just kind of go with the flow. 🙂
The two last parts of the series–the chemistry and the physics–are both approved for up through 8th grade, so if you are doing one of those two series, your 13yo is fine. We use these from 3rd-8th grade, and THEN we begin Apologia.
I was using the Burgess Animal Book and the Bird Book as well. So would you say that I read them aloud whenever it suited our fancy rather necessarily scheduling them.
And would the Storybook of Science fit in here anywhere either as a read aloud or for independent reading for an older child?
There are also some other living science books at Yesterday’s Classics; the other Fabre Books, Buckley series and a couple others. I schedule these as inependant reads on our scicne days, along with the Christian Liberty readers. I read aloud the G-d’s Design and Storybook of Science and they read the others independantly, with either narration or qustions (in the case of the Liberty Readers).
The Fabre books, Ernest Seton and the Holden book at the link to Yesterday’s Classics given above come to mind for that age group. I gave a link to other living scinece books on the post about High School living books mmore recently (as in just a few mintues ago!).
HTH, Rachel
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