The rest of our science curriculum came today for my boys, 2nd and 5th grades this fall, and I have to share it with you!
We started our homeschooling journey with Apologia's Exploring Creation Astronomy by Jeannie Fulbright, 1st Edition, 11 years ago, and now that I've taught Astronomy four times through, I am so thrilled to have a beautiful new 2nd Edition to use this year! It now comes with an Activity Guide for the projects and I also bought the Audio CD, so I'll have help with the reading. How nice it is to be able to do dishes, sweep the floor or make lunch while the audio book reads to my students!
So why this particular Science Curriculum? There are so many reasons we use and love this curriculum. Let me list them for you.
1) I love the way the text captures and keeps my children's attention. Fulbright's style is conversational with questions throughout. Whenever I get ahead of the text and explain something to my kids or add my own questions, I always find that whatever I felt the need to add was already there in the text if I had just kept reading!
2) There are hands-on activities throughout the text and wonderful projects at the end of each lesson. There are so many good ones, we get to choose different ones each time we cycle through, so no one ever gets bored. (It me. I'm the one who gets easily bored with repetition.)
3) The Notebooking Journals are filled with pages for the students to record what they've learned in each lesson. I like to pick and choose the pages we do and put them together in my student's portfolio binder along with any other related drawings, worksheets, and photos of projects and field trips.
4) There are review questions at the end of each lesson that you can use as quizzes for older students, if your homeschool program requires a written, graded assessment.
In some school years we have focused on just one of the beautiful books in the Apologia Exploring Creation series. Other years, we have surveyed a few, using some lessons from each. Other years, I have explored other science resources, but I always come back to this tried and true series for Elementary Science.
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