Apologia Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics Review for K-6th grade

Having seen Apologia Educational Ministries, INC at the vendor hall, heard them speak at homeschool conventions, having drooled over the Apologia curriculum and having done a review for them in the past while on the TOS Review Crew, I was thrilled to be asked to take part in this review. Once the Young Explorer Series Exploring Chemistry and Physics, a homeschool science curriculum showed up in the mail, homeschool young man was ready to start. Our son was just going crazy over the color pictures, upcoming fun experiments and the activity pages in the Exploring Creation with Chemistry & Physics Notebooking Journal!! Due to a shipping error we were sent the wrong notebooking journal by Apologia, they offered for us to keep the wrong one and then promptly sent us the correct one. I was excited to be able to use the Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics Junior Notebooking Journal. I've never had chemistry or physics so I thought it would be a great way for me to pick up on some of the materials so I have at least a foundation in those two subjects.

The homeschool young man is interested in becoming a physician. (this is the reason why this homeschool Momma will not be re-joining the TOS Review Crew for the 2013-2014 school year. The homeschool young man has been accepted to a medical school's physician prep program, so our days are going to be a little busy with this program, so I would not have the needed time to devote to the wonderful TOS Review Crew.) So in preparing the homeschool young man for a ministry in medicine, I've got some tough subjects in my future as a homeschool Momma. Chemistry and Physics SCARE ME and can keep me awake at night if I am not careful! lol. When this review came out, I saw that it was for K-6th grade, but thought this would be helpful to me, so I applied and explained my reasoning. I was so excited when we were approved for the Young Explorer Series Exploring Chemistry and Physics review.

While completing this review, I noticed that the materials were right on this tired, old homeschool Momma's level and of course too low for my freshmen homeschool young man (remember that Young Explorer Series Exploring Chemistry and Physics is for K-6th grade), but he still enjoyed it. Sometimes it's fun for our homeschool kids to have something that is educational, yet easy.

 

There were so many concepts in this homeschool science resource from

Apologia Educational Ministries, INC that were a great foundation for homeschool young man to learn before stepping into their high school series on these subject. I think it is important to learn some concepts as a younger student, they might not fully understand them or know exactly how to put them into practice. Nevertheless, when the full scope of learning comes about, there are some foundational materials in the brain already and I think it helps things come together in the end.

The Young Explorer Series Exploring Chemistry and Physics book is a very nice hardcover textbook, which could be used by more than one student. Textbook is $39.00 (hardcover) and is authored by Jeannie Fulbright. You all know me and how I like bright colored pictures in my textbooks, you have got those in the Young Explorer Series Exploring Chemistry and Physics, and LOTS OF THEM! Nothing less than what you would expect from a quality homeschool science curriculum like Apologia Educational Ministries, INC. "Engaging text, many hands on demonstrations, projects and experiments and exciting articles." Your child will make bouncy balls, lava lamps, smoke bombs (COOL!) and mini motors. There is a list in the back of the book for needed supplies for the experiments. They are all pretty easy to locate. I will give you a hint though, for ease of doing the experiments in our busy homeschooling lives, I would shop around for a supply kit, because I find it is MUCH easier on me if I actually have everything bagged up for me, for each experiment, otherwise I find it an effort to drop what I am doing and drive to town to buy X. It is so much easier for me to say, "We will do this tomorrow." Well, ya know what? In our perfect world tomorrow NEVER seems to come! So homeschool Momma, treat yourself to a pre-made kit of supplies.


The homeschool Momma's notebook was the Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics Junior Notebooking Journal it was just right for me! There were coloring pages, short vocab crossword puzzles, lapbooking (homeschool young man liked those, but who does not like lapbooking? lol). Very easy to do and great graphics as usual from Apologia Educational Ministries, INC. This notebooking journal for the young grades is just $24.00, you can use the hardcover textbook without the Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics Junior Notebooking Journal, but I do not recommend it. The notebooking journals add so much to the learning process that I personally think that they are essential.

The homeschooled young man used the Exploring Creation with Chemistry & Physics Notebooking Journal also $24.00. The older kids notebooking journal has many of the same things as the Junior Notebook does, but at a higher level of difficulty. The fun and economical aspect of Apologia Educational Ministries, INC is that you can buy one textbook for your family and then just buy the needed notebooks based on grade. For one low price you can teach science to all your children together, while each works at a different level in their notebooks. How easy is that on the busy homeschool Momma's schedule!



You all know that I like to get the most bang for my buck when it comes to education. When I think of skills learned by using Young Explorer Series Exploring Chemistry and Physics I think of public speaking (telling me back what was learned), reading/oral reading of daily work, writing skills, Bible and so much more! I love how the textbooks are written in an easy to read fashion, the text really flows as the student reads. The suggested use is 2 days per week, for this review we were asked to do 4 days per week. In our homeschool we do science 5 days per week, so it was manageable for us. We enjoyed the sections on atoms and energy, we had not studied either of those in the past. As a homeschool Momma, my favorite part was the fact that the answer keys were easy to use! Homeschool young man loved the puzzles in the book, I had thought he would like the experiments, but it was the vocab puzzles that he liked best. 

 

The only thing that I thought about regarding this review that was negative is that I think that there is a LOT of notebooking activities for the Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics Junior Notebooking Journal. I would not get bogged down with the notebooking at this young age (K-3rd), I would let them pick and choose what to do in the notebook, UNLESS you would be trading out handwriting class, for them writing on the copywork pages. To me the Exploring Creation with Chemistry & Physics Notebooking Journal would be just the right amount of work for a 4th-6th grader.

 

YET AGAIN, ANOTHER QUALITY PRODUCT FROM

Apologia Educational Ministries, INC.

Click below to see what my Crew buddies had to say when they wrote their reviews.

Moe

   

Come join the Schoolhouse Review Crew!!

We have had such a great time as part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew this year that we want to invite you to join us! Click here to join the Crew.

Moe

  

FREE Bible download just for you!

Our family loves Rose-Publishing! They are a favorite stopping point during homeschool conventions. They offer a free Rose Bible eChart each week, so sign up to get yours. This week is on end times.

Click here for your FREE download. Rose Bible eCharts End Times
These eCharts are great for use in your homeschool.
Please Note: Our weekly eCharts are provided as a free service, but it does cost us time and money to create and send these emails. Any order from Rose-Publishing.com is appreciated!

Moe
p.s. I did not get anything for posting this  ;-)

Bridgeway Academy homeschool review

We were given an 8 week long program to review called Easy Essay from Bridgeway Academy. Scroll down on that page and Easy Essay is the 10th item down from the top. As a TOS Review Crew member I jumped at this chance because essay writing in our home has always been a chore! And you all know how much we like to do chores!  UGH!!

The Easy Essay class meets for 90 minutes (TOS Review Crew has a shortened class time of 60 min) with 2-3 hours per week of homework. Easy Essay is for 9th-12th grade students. For successfully completing the Learning Lab course the student receives 1/2 credit elective towards high school graduation. The cost of Easy Essay is $275.00. Bridgeway Academy has a whole course line up at the online learning academy, with classes for all ages and they even offer Learning Labs for use in
Co-ops!

The class had a main focus of organization, structure and design and taught the basics of getting started in writing an essay. Things like brain storming for ideas, using Graphic Organizers, 3 point thesis,  and the final class today will be over how to write a 5 paragraph essay in 45 min.

A lot of learning went on in this class, though there were a few glitches with the audio and recordings. The classes were done through Jigsaw Meeting, which is the platform that is used for the class. For some reason the classes were not all recorded (I think it was a Jigsaw Meeting issue and NOT a Bridgeway Academy issue). I do hope that before they do this again they will have the glitches worked out or go with another platform to carry the classes. We did have to miss a class due to a doctor appointment that was out of town and of course wouldn't you know it, that was one of the sessions that was not recorded. LOL...but I guess so many missed that class that Mrs. Kulp (the teacher) took the time to repeat the class for us all. That was very kind of her to do, especially since it was the class that my son was really eager to attend, it was on thesis statements and he has always struggled with writing those. That has been very annoying to my homeschooled young man.

Homework was assigned in each class and was due by Friday 5pm. This was all fine and good, but we did not always get the homework graded and sent back to us in a timely fashion. Sometimes it was not returned until just before class time, last weeks homework has yet to arrive. The comments on the homework were well done. A Debra Watson graded some of my homeschool young man's work and she had a few typos that I thought were very unprofessional such as MY instead of ME in wording. The comments were very helpful on the homework, here is a quoted comment from week 3 essay.

"a thesis needs to have 3 points and make a clear statement. So, you’re missing 2 points and I don’t understand the overall "so what" or the importance of this. Why is studying more that important? Remember our formula is STATEMENT + 3 MAIN POINTS + SO WHAT ( or why is this important anyway) = THESIS."

Here is a comment from the homework that was sent back to us today.

"Overall this essay has the proper structure but is missing the key elements that guide it and make it understandable, namely a sound thesis and clear supporting points. Go back to the outlining phase and really think through the points you are trying to prove. What do you want to say? How can you say it clearly? How can you prove you point of view? College is important because…. 1) 2) 3) Does this makes sense? Let’s talk about this in a private meeting this week so that we can really hone in on how to organize an essay from the start so that you end up with a clear final product."

This is all fine and great, but the problem that I have is that it came by email at 9:15am (while I'm typing up this review), class starts at 12:15pm, that is just not enough time to look this over and fix things for class and be ready to discuss it. As he is working on this right now he finds that the link for today's homework does not work regarding the "Transition Words."
The homeschool young man has other classes that he is doing and he can't just scrap the day and start working on Easy Essay. I know we homeschoolers are suppose to be flexible, but once you get into the high school years, you have a different schedule than you did when the kids were in lower grades. My main dislike of this review was the turn around time on homework.  Also there was no grading of the grammar/spelling in the essays, to me that should be included, I even correct grammar/spelling in other subjects in my homeschool.

We did run into a homework glitch while we were on an out of town trip. I made sure everything was in my email account and ready to go. We left on our trip, got to our hotel and the homeschool young man went to open up the emails to start his work, only to find out that our email server at home is not like Yahoo or Hotmail where you can access your already opened emails from another computer, so we had NOTHING to work with. Homeschool young man contacted Bridgeway Academy right away. Mrs. Kulp was great in emailing the info to our Yahoo account so we could access it. She was always quick to get back with us via email.

The homeschool young man really liked the content of the program (though he wished that the videos had all worked because he wanted to go back and watch them over again.) He liked being called upon in class and reading things out loud for the teacher. (do I have a teacher's pet or what?  LOL). He did learn a lot and has actually put it in to use in real life already. He has also applied to a medical program for high school aged students and he had to write an essay as to why he was interested in the program. (cha ching! Easy Essay to the rescue!). I was freaking out thinking, "How on earth is he going to write an essay?" He just piped up and said "Oh, mom that will be simple, I learned how to do this in my Easy Essay class with Mrs. Kulp." Let's just say there is one excited Homeschool Momma here, because he did so well on the essay that he was invited to interview for the program. And I will tell you it's a highly selective program as they only take in 10 kids total, 7 kids from the public school and 3 kids from homeschool/private school/parochial school. So he was up against some stiff competition I am sure. So yes you can learn a lot in just 8 weeks of 1 hour classes (class that the TOS Review Crew received, paying students will get 9 weeks and 90 min classes).

Here is a quick overview of the program works with Easy Essay. Before classes started we got an email explaining how to get hooked up with the video chat called Jigsaw Meeting, it's FREE. The homeschool young man was able to get this all set up himself. We had some concern since we do not have high speed Internet (we have low speed country Internet lol), so we called Bridgeway Academy right away and tech support told us that if we could view the videos on the website we would be fine. They do have a test button to check to see if your connection is good enough. Sure enough no troubles. We have a web cam, but no headset with a microphone, so I found a decent priced one online at my FAV store. Mrs. Kulp then sent out an email with all the details of the class, syllabus, list of assignments that were due.
The first day of class Mrs. Kulp showed up about an hour early for class so that everyone could test out their equipment. We were totally stumped by the TALK button...(lol...at least for this household) on using the talk button, but we got that figured out right away.

I did like that fact that Bridgeway Academy and Easy Essay are taught from a Biblical worldview. Easy Essay works on teaching listening skills, verbal skills (talking back and forth to the teacher) and class participation. The teachers are licensed instructors, Mrs. Kulp is a licensed teacher of secondary education in the state of PA. I did not care for the fact that I could not hear what was going on in the class, so that made writing that portion of the review hard for me, I had to get a lot of info from the homeschooled young man. I will say this much, every time I walked by the screen and Mrs. Kulp what up there, she had a smile on her face  :O) I also liked the parent letter that she sent out very early on in the class. Here is what it said. "I have an assignment for you! Please respond to this email stating your child's name, grade level and the biggest struggle you see, as their teacher/parent, with their writing. What is one goal that I can help accomplish over the next 7 weeks? Also, please identify what type of language arts curriculum you are using."

I personally think that Easy Essay $275 for a homeschooling family to spend on a 1/2 credit hour class is a lot of money, considering that in my area of the country a homeschool student could take a college class for $25.00 more and have 3 college credits and 1 high school credit. But as you can see taking the class has already helped my homeschooled young man in life. So you decided.
Moe