We used their Chemistry this year for my 11th grade daughter and I didn’t have to do anything. My sister-in-law is using the Jr. High curriculum with her 12 (just turned 13) year old boy this school year and they have really liked it. She doesn’t do much with him. She has told me he just goes and does it on his own. I will be doing the same with my 12 year old son this coming school year. Hope this helps!
Danielle, I checked it out today and was really please!! it’s so pricey, though – that’s it’s hard to swallow. Still praying about it, but it is what DS (my non-science child) really wants to use, as opposed to Apologia General Science.
We are going with Apologia’s General Science and I thought I’d share why. These are just conversations between hubby and I, so we don’t have “proof” per say – just what we see.
When we talked to one of the guy’s at College Plus (the route we are taking for our children’s secondary education) he said that they actually recommend using the Apologia texts to study for the CLEP science exams. They are really that thorough.
Our thoughts with Beginning’s Publishing (Rainbow, Spectrum) were that there is 1 book that covers biology, physics, and chemistry – for Rainbow – in one year. It’s sort of a small book compared to the general science book from Apologia. We were just wondering how you could get a wide body of knowledge on 3 different areas of science from such a small coverage.
DS isn’t not really science oriented, so he doesn’t really want to do science again if he doesn’t have to. Our thoughts are to do General Science this year, Physical Science, the Biology and Chemistry (the last 2 he can CLEP out of for college credit).
Schola Press has done a HUGE amount of work for me (and him) and split up each of the Apologia books into lesson plans for the entire year. We are going to be using their plans for General Science as well as the Elementary Botany.
I just thought I would share why we are going this direction. Plus, I’m taking a little break from making menus! LOL
Bumping this up. I’m debating using either Apologia General Science over 2 years (6th/7th) or Rainbow Science. I’d love to hear from users of each re. their reasons for choice.
I didn’t use Rainbow so take this witha grain of salt (also, I considered this when my 21 yr old was in going into 7th – a while ago). One of our main goals for our homeschool is that they know what they believe and can defend it. We are young earth creationist and Rainbow did not “pass mustard” in trying to achieve that. So, we planned on going with Apologia. We ended up not using either one and putting together living books and hands on experiments and a lot of AIG materials.
I know this is an old thread, but I am still unsettled as to what I will do with my youngest. @pollysoup – Do you mind sharing which books you used for GS? Did you use a specific experiment book for this or did you pull together from various sources? What AIG materials did you find most helpful to you in GS?