(I am going to repost my thoughts on science here, so board members won't need to scroll through such a long science thread to read this!)
I am finally feeling more settled about the science (at least for the new ancient's guide "Hearts for Him Through Time: Creation to Christ)! I am so grateful to each and every one of you for taking time to share your experiences and your thoughts about science. It's a blessing to be able to dialogue with like-minded moms who strive to put the Lord first and desire to equip their children both academically and spiritually to do the Lord's calling.
We are excited to have a general science sequence for our upcoming guides in place. Our plan is to have a Life Science/Biology focus for our new ancient's guide, an Earth Science focus for the next guide, a Physical Science focus for the third guide in the series, and a Chemistry/Physics focus for the last guide (done so as not to require a higher level of math for working formulas) along with a look at the creation/evolution debate.
This sequence will be less tied to the history and be more independent in its scope and sequence. Within each year of science there will be a variety of topics covered to keep the science interesting. I agree that too much time spent on one topic won't keep kiddos interest as much as a variety will.
We would recommend that if kiddos have a science bent or a family is very science-minded, they could easily substitute or add-in upper level Apologia or Rainbow Science. However, for our own family, we will be teaching what we have scheduled within our guides. Here's a peek into our plans for the upcoming ancients guide.
For our life science/biology year, we plan to use Elementary Apologia's Zoology 3: Land Animals of the Sixth Day for the first half of the year. Here's a link to the book: https://apologia.securesites.net/store/ ... cts_id=104
While Zoo. 1 is recommended as a prerequisite, this is only due to the animal classification system introduced in Zoo.1. For our purposes, we do not find this to be a barrier in the use of Zoo. 3, and we will include an animal classification chart for reference or refer customers to the online chapter provided for Zoo. 1 at the Apologia website to remedy this factor.
After completing Zoo.3, students will move onto a nature journal type study of birds and then plants with the following 2 CM-style resources: Birds of the Air (link to chapter): http://www.yesterdaysclassics.com/previ ... review.pdf
Plant Life in Field and Garden (link to chapter): http://www.yesterdaysclassics.com/previ ... review.pdf
Then, we will finish up the year with a study of the human body, using the following 3 resources:
Galen and the Gateway to Medicine (link): http://www.bethlehembooks.com/product_d ... =974549960
The History of Medicine (link): http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/ ... iew=covers
An Illustrated Adventure in Human Anatomy (link): http://www.hometrainingtools.com/produc ... plate_id=2
We will write plans of our own for the daily follow-up assignments for these texts similar to the design of the Preparing Hearts guide's science. Each week, we will include each of the following: notebooking, written narration, an experiment (keeping any of those in the Apologia book that are not overwhelming), and questions to answer. These will all be kept within a science journal or a tabbed 3-ring science binder. Vocabulary words will be included within the science assignments and as part of the weekly lab sheet (instead of within the history portion of our ancient's guide). We will also schedule the readings daily and plan for this portion of the student's day to be independent.
Since this post is getting long, I'll put my tentative thoughts on future years of HOD science options in a new post!
Blessings,
Carrie