This week, we’re celebrating our 100th day of our first year of homeschool! We were blessed to receive review copies from several homeschool companies, and now that we’re this far into our year, I want to share some reviews of the curriculum we are using! I will be posting reviews all week so stay tuned! And if you dont homeschool, I’ll be posting regular posts as well – never fear!

*****

Science can be a very intimidating subject to many homeschool, myself included. But when I discovered Apologia Science and the Exploring Creation series, all of that changed!

This series, written for elementary students by Jeannie Fulbright, covers all basic areas of science in a God-honoring and mom-friendly manner. It became even more student-friendly for all elementary students this year as Apologia added junior notebooks for younger students, like my kindergartener!

Year-long courses are available in Botany, Zoology 1, Zoology 2, Zoology 3, Anatomy & Physiology, and our course for this year, Astronomy.

Here are my thoughts on our experience with Apologia Astronomy so far…

Big J LOVES learning about space and the planets. Astronomy was the perfect science for us this year!

The notebooking journal {regular or junior} contains a possible layout for the year – I’ve followed it loosely in my planning, but also gone at our own pace without any problems. I like having a guide, but not a strict schedule, so this is wonderful.

There is a LOT of material for the teacher, aka me, to read to Big J in each chapter. That was rough for us at first. Big J had a hard sitting still and retaining the information, until I figured out a few things:

*The coloring pages at the beginning of each lesson are perfect for him to work on while he listens – and he is still able to answer questions at the end of each segment.

*I can break up the reading any way I want depending on his attention span – I’m being flexible.

*If something seems to in-depth or complicated, we skip that part – for now. This hasn’t happened very often, but as a kindergartener, there is some info that can wait!

The project and experiment ideas have been the amazing! Hands-on is the best way to learn science, especially for boys!

We’ve made balloon planets to hang from our ceiling…

…sculpted a mini-version of Stonehenge…

…made Venus volcanoes, shut ourselves in a dark room with a flashlight and a tennis ball to recreate the phases of the moon, melted chocolate with a magnifying glass and the sun, and many more fun things! The projects are not complicated and use mostly household items.

The junior notebooking journal is the perfect compliment to the text, with areas for Big J to write AND draw what he is learning, as well as Scripture copywork and minibooks, useful for review at the end of a chapter.

Our current activity is journaling the phases of the moon! Both boys are noticing anytime they see the moon and commenting on the current phase. Today is a full moon – lots of excitement around here!

I was never really crazy about science in general throughout my school years, but I look forward to anytime I pull out these books to work with Big J! From my experience over the last semester, I highly recommend the Exploring Creation series from Apologia!

If you would like to read more from Apologia Science author Jeannie Fulbright, check out my interview with her from earlier this year!

*****

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this curriculum from Apologia in exchange for my honest review. I was not compensated in any other way for this post, and all opinions are 100% my own.