Sassafras Science?

I’ve been using Zoology (the first book) with my 11 and 8-year olds. They really like it for the most part.

The story spine is interesting, but I wouldn’t call it a living book. It’s not ‘great’ writing. It’s sort of like reading an encyclopedia entry that’s been fancied up. The boys think it’s ‘pretty cool’ though.

You really can’t use the book solo. There just isn’t enough information. So you do need to do the extra stuff suggested.

The way the program works is that you read a short section in the spine book and then do the following:

Notebooking – in this section you fill out a sheet about a certain animal. For example, if we read about lions we then look up some information in an encyclopedia and other elementary books, and add it to the note booking page. You draw can draw a picture or print one and glue it. We did this for a few weeks and the boys hated it. They are just not notebookers! Sassafras is coming out with an app (currently in Play, but not the iApp store or Amazon yet). This might make it cooler to them.

Encyclopedia – for each animal studied you’re supposed to look up the animal. She gives page numbers for the encyclopedia she uses, but we had two at home and just use what we have. The boys actually enjoy doing this and it’s only a page or two.

Picture books – you’re also supposed to read additional books (picture books, elementary age) about the animals you study. She does list some suggestions but my library never has them so I have to search to find what they do have. Sometimes they have nothing or it’s very poor quality (too old, no pictures, super long, boring, etc). In that case I need to either be content with just the encyclopedia (or Wikipedia entry) or buy some books myself. This can add up! My boys do enjoy reading books like this.

Overall I feel the program feels choppy. Read a page or two from the story spine then stop and go into encyclopedia, books, and note booking. Spend a few days there then go back into the story for a page or two then back out. The boys get frustrated sometimes because they want to know what happens in the story.

After a few months of this I’m probably going to change it so we read the entire chapter and then study the various animals then go back to the next chapter. I’m not sure if this will fix the stop/start feel to it.

I think it’s a decent science program. Not super in-depth, like the younger Apologia. You can make it as deep or shallow as you want based on the books and amount of time you put into each animal. They enjoy it. It’s pretty easy to teach (fairly open-and-go aside from the library stuff). I’m not sure we’ll be continuing in the series yet, but I don’t want to poke my eyes out every day when we do it.