Sabbath Mood Science

I would love to hear opinions as well.  I’m considering these for jr. high and high school science instead of Apologia.

Our view of science is different from many of the other Charlotte Mason advocates. You can read about why we differ on this subject in our answer to the questions, “What is your approach to science through the grade levels? Do you use living science books?” on our SCM Curriculum FAQ page. Basically, we think it is important for the student to learn a science, not just learn about a science.

As for what Sabbath Mood has to offer, my personal opinion, based on the one course I have reviewed, is that their courses fall more in the learning about a science category than learning the science. For instance, they recommend the book Men, Microscopes, and Living Things as the spine book for the middle school biology course. That book does not teach any biology. Instead, it gives a summary of the history of biology as a science through several short biographies of a few scientists.

A couple of things to be aware of for anyone who decides to use Sabbath Mood’s science courses and/or living science book list. While many of the books on their list and used in their courses are fine, some of the books used/recommended have inaccurate information in them as the books were published many years ago before new discoveries were made in the different fields of science. Also, some of the recommended books are filled with evolutionary thought, including Men, Microscopes, and Living Things. The author of at least one book, The Disappearing Spoon, is an unapologetic atheist who is crass and vulgar in his writing and mocks those who believe the universe was created.

I encourage you to carefully review the books that are recommended by any curriculum or website before giving them to your student.

Thank you for this helpful information.

You can use the Apologia textbooks either way. Personally, I used them as written because I wanted my children to have experience with textbook style questions and tests. Other moms have their students narrate after each reading. Some moms do a mix of both with some chapters narrated and some the student answers the questions. Some have their student complete the tests as written. Others have their student complete some of the tests, but don’t worry about completing them all. I think any of those approaches are fine as long as the student is learning the material covered in the course.

I know you didn’t ask about the notebooks that Apologia sells to go with each science course, but just so anyone reading this knows, we do not recommend the notebooks.

My son will be using part of the Sabbath Mood physics, along with some Apologia.

I looked at the biology and chemistry, but didn’t use it for many of the reasons Karen said.

We will use Friendly Biology, Chemistry, and Anatomy.  Followed by Sabbath Mood physics.

I am switching out some of the labs and supplementing with a few things.

So if I’m reading the reading these posts correctly, the only issues have been with the Biology lessons. If that’s wrong, please correct me. We used The Riot and the Dance for Biology, and I plan to continue with that for my other kids. For high school, my plan is to use Sabbath Mood for Chemistry and Physics. Has anyone encountered problems with either of those subjects?

Thanks for any input.

We used the Sabbath Mood high school Chemistry guide for a few weeks last year. It wasn’t a good fit for us over all but I really did like quite a bit about it and I learned a lot about structuring a science program around living books.

I don’t remember any inappropriate content but we obviously didn’t get very far into it. We enjoyed, and still use, The Elements book by Theodore Gray. The main text for chemistry-A Wonder Book of Chemistry, I think is the title-was good as well. There was another book scheduled that is written for adults and is secular, so I was a little concerned about that one. We didn’t get far enough into the program to use it so I don’t have any actual experience with it.

We had two issues with the course. First, there is an experiment scheduled each and every week. They required all kinds of things that are not readily available and took quite a bit of time. We love experiments but, considering the chemistry portion is only 3 days a week, one of those spent on experiments was a little too much. I’m sure it would have been fun to do them all but we found it too costly and too hard to work into our schedule.

Secondly, the lessons took too long for our family. It all depends on how much time you schedule for science but it was too much for us.

In the end we switched to a combination of Apologia Chemistry (the old edition), John Hudson Tiner’s Exploring the World of Chemistry and The Elements book aforementioned. My daughter also keeps a science notebook and we adapted some of the Sabbath Mood ideas into our curriculum. Apologia Chemistry was a slog. If I had it to do over again, I would go with Friendly Chemistry. I really think Apologia Chemistry is just information overload unless your child is science and math oriented.

Now that we have the Biology and Chemistry credits under our belt, we plan on pursuing a year of delight directed integrated science next year (11th grade) and are super excited about it!