How do I incorporate Apologia Sciences?

My oldest will be using Physical Science and, although I have a schedule, I plan to see how long it takes him complete the scheduled reading to see if it is too long.  Sometimes this particular student of mine does better when he tackles it all at one time rather than coming back to it later. I will let him decide, wtih my guidance, of course.

And, if we don’t accomplish the entire book, that is fine, I have a few bios and related books I’d like him to read (I may read to him, we’ll see), so it can’t just be textbook, experiments, notebook pages, lab sheets.  I’d like some living books thrown in.

BTW, he has only used General Science from Apologia and a smidgen of Astronomy and scored Advanced in science in our year-end testing.  I know he took his time and tried really hard on the test, but I was still surprised since I know we don’t “teach to the test.” 

Yes, the first few modules are a bit challenging, to say the least! Somewhere in the later modules I allowed him to move forward to the modules he was “dying” to get to. The human anatomy modules highly interested him, so I let him go for it. He is now working on physical science and using a guide for pacing (and for gentle reminders). He is ok w/ doing what is expected, and so am I, but we don’t want it to become something entirely unenjoyable. That’s where the living books, field trips, experiments, etc. come in. We have to make time for those as well as the reading of the text.

Hth

Well, for my ds, if I had not allowed him to skip ahead to what really interested him, the *joy* would not have been there. He would have done the work, but it was becoming tedious and he felt he understood the concepts already, etc. Once he began Mod. 11 and willingly shared/narrated, with excitement, is when I knew I had done the right thing.  He still scored Advanced in science in our year-end testing.  He takes those tests pretty seriously, took his time, and was the last student out.  I was proud of him for taking it seriously and doing the best he knew to do.

He does enjoy youtube videos and watches a lot of those, too.

Disclaimer: I am “old school” minded myself.  I had a lot of public school mentality that needed to be weeded out to even embrace CM, so to embrace “skipping ahead” or “dropping” a book is hard for me, or has been hard for me, I should say.  I still have to have good reason for it, a reasonable/convincing argument needs to made, or I need to remember CM’s words about it being enjoyable to the child/mom.  In our home, that does not mean that we can do that every day of the week with every book we don’t enjoy and get excited about, but when it needs to be done, then I’ve made a point to consider all aspects and come to a conclusion.  We have NOT finished every book that was guaranteed a “must read” simply because we didn’t enjoy it. That was hard and I didn’t think I’d ever do that!  Amazingly, the world did not come to an end as I had expected.  Yeah!! 

I hope this has been helpful.  This forum has given me much wisdom as when to persevere and when it’s probably best to move on or find a substitute.  (And that will vary from family to family.)  In the end, only you know what’s best for your student/family.

@my3boys…You should have seen my son’s face after we completed our study of mod 11.  He sighed with relief and said he actually liked today’s science.  Yahoo!!!!  He enjoyed learning that our bones are hollow, yet filled with marrow that produces blood cells.  We then talked about when I was a child and loved to suck out all that mushy stuff in the center of the bone that was in the ham slice my mother would fry.  That was always my favorite part, then once done I would slip the bone around my tongue to make silly faces at my brother. Lol. I do believe science was a “home-run” today.  Yay!

Thanks again.

@my3boys:  I’m hearing mod 1 & 2 in the General Science are particularly dull.  My 7th grader will be using it this year, so I am undecided if I should start at the beginning or skip to the good part.  I don’t want to get into a habit of skipping all of the not-so-fun stuff if it’s important (like skipping the veggies at supper and starting with dessert).  But I can see it’s going to be a hard sell, even with the audio cd.  What do you think are the most important things to take from those modules?

I’m thinking of doing the first module with him to get him started on the right track.  I don’t mind if he takes a year and a half to finish if he’s getting everything he can out of it, but if he’s just bored, we may have to resort to plan B. Just need to figure out what that is.  

Did you use the test package by chance?

Now that we are in module 11, I’m wondering if at some point we should go back and just skim through the beginning modules to get some of the foundational ideas. However, I’m almost certain he will not care for it. It does appear very dry.  If and when we go back, I will keep close watch on his response.  If he’s yawning…we are moving on.

I try to think back to when I was my ds age of 13.  I liked Language Arts class when my teacher read to us from Johnny Tremain. I like my Pre-Algebra teacher because he made the formulas come alive with silly sayings like, “If this doesn’t work, I’ll eat my right shoe!”, and I hated my history teacher because he never moved from his chair and spoke with a monotone voice!  I guess what I’m figuring out is, stick with the interesting stuff because anything that is not appealing is NOT going to be retained.

Today, when we continued the “bone” in mod 11, I got on-line and showed my ds that restaurants actually serve bones w/ marrow as a delicacy.  We then prodceeded to learn more in-depth stuff about marrow and bone structure.  From the results I have seen these past two days, I’ll say if subject matter looses their focus…move on. I do know this… ds will never forget about his bones.

Perhaps when he is more mature, he will come across some of the foundational stuff and it will be more interesting…

I can only hope.  

Love reading through all of these posts.  Thanks all of you.