I am starting CM as my 14 year old daughter starts her high school years. We are easing into narration using Aesop’ s Fables. Some of them are hard for her but she does well with others. It depends on whether the scenario is a familiar one. My question is how do we use Apologia science and combine it with narration. Do I just use small portions and require her to narrate those, gradually increasing the length of passage I read? My concern is that this will take forever to get through the book. I understand that our focus is learning and not just getting through the book but I live in New York so I have to meet their requirements with grades, etc. Any advice? Thanks!
We used Apologia science last year for 5th grade. I purchased a separate little pack (by Lynn Ericson) that had a 5 day breakdown of the lessons and told you exactly what pages to read each day. (This was well worth the extra little amount of money it cost) With it broken down like that it wasn’t a large amount of reading for each lesson so that even with narrating it didn’t take extremely long. I don’t know about the high school courses and how much reading is required for each lesson. Sometimes we would take turns narrating too. My son liked that!! I found that he didn’t need to narrate every detail presented, just as long as he had a grasp of the content.
We were doing an elementary level course. I don’t know what the high school courses are like, but someone did mention that they have tests incorporated in them.
I used Apologia General Science for both of my girls, and one has also taken Apologia Biology. We just did very casual oral narrations for those courses which was simple because they both were interested to talk about what they were learning.
I didn’t have them do written narrations because we used a sort of online co-op group to complete the course. You can find it here: http://www.virtualhomeschoolgroup.com. It is free of charge, and they have a class that you can attend with other students online at certain times, or you can enroll in the at-your-own-pace course, which is what we did. There is a voicethread to listen to and watch (with slides showing various photos & graphics), quizzes to take, labs to complete and turn in, and an exam to take for each module. The quizzes and exams are graded for you to use for grading purposes, and if your student turns in the lab sheets, they will grade those as well. We chose not to hand in labs because our local co-op offered Apologia lab courses, and it was nice to have help with labs.
It was easy to do it this way, and it made it easier on me time-wise. My older daughter completed her courses pretty much independently. My younger daughter usually needed help studying the module study guides, but she did pretty well on the exams.
OK. I will warn you. General Science after the first module is tough to narrate. My kids had been doing it for years, and still found this to be true. Also, while I value narration immensely—narration is not always the best tool, if it’s the only tool, used on information-dense texts. I recommend using a combination of narration and effective note-taking for high-school level science texts. You can often learn a great deal by using narration for big-picture, history, processes, etc, but there are just some things you need to learn, like vocabulary, and I don’t think narration to be the most effective way of handling that.
How do you set up a notebook for apologia general science? is it just a relaxed written narration and apropriate diagrams? or do you make tabbed sections for tests, onyour own questions, experiments etc? trying to set it up for my 13 yo to use asap…….thanks for any who respond.
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