I do have to say that the Notebooks provided by Apologia have LOTS of excellent living books listed at the end of each chapter. We always get a half dozen or so and sometimes the videos too from their recommendations and just have them around the house for the girls to read whenever.
My ds is in the same boat but w/ Swimming Creatures. He enjoys the reading/experiments but we’ve dropped the notebook. He does like to draw but writing is not his favorite (copywork, yes, writing when there may be no end, not so much). I, too, wish I would’ve used just living books, experiments, nature study, narration in the elementary years, especially w/ my oldest ds. My ds that is still reading Swimming..has started Jack’s Insects and enjoys those notebooking pages much better. We are still taking it slow, one chapter a week, and extending the notebooking pages, no rush.
My DC love Apologia. We rarely do any of the notebooking. I had them do a Venn diagram to finish up our last chapter, and that was the first of the notebooking assigments we’d done in several chapters. We usually visit the book extras websites or look up youtube videos of the animals we are studying. We also discuss the narrations together.
I also sometimes have them do a science lab report. They draw a picture of the procedure, so there is very little writing. My DC also enjoy creating, but aren’t fans of writing.
As far as the notebooks that are purchased seperately…They were written well after the textbooks, so they are definitely optional!