Being in my 19th year of homeschooling and having only the baby of the family left to educate, we're mostly on auto-pilot when it comes to curriculum choices. Why break what ain't fixed, as they say.
But instead of keeping with that eloquent maxim, I decided to use a different science curriculum with Annika this year. I am a
big fan of Apologia’s Science Curriculum generally, but it’s a lot for a
dyslexic child to digest.
She wants to be a nurse so I really want her to understand
and learn the work, not just get it done so she can move on, which often
happens when she is taking an Apologia course at our co op. Not because it’s a
bad course, on the contrary our co op science courses are amazing and the
teacher is awesome! The problem I’ve found with my dyslexic students is one of
timing. We have to fit the whole curriculum into 30 weeks. I wanted to do
something at home this year so that if we need to stretch it out into the
summer we have the ability to do that. We can go a bit slower if we need to and
I think that’s going to make a big difference.
This year for a variety of reasons (not the least of which
being that the timing of the Chemistry class didn’t work very well with her
schedule) we decided to try something different. A curriculum I found called Chemistry 101. We’re starting week 4 and so
far, I am very pleased. Best of all, ANNIKA LIKES IT!!
The Chemistry 101 program is entirely DVD
based, but they have a CD with PDF documents you can print out to create a
binder like this. Also, they give you a clear path to making sure that even though
this Chemistry is a bit nontraditional, it meets requirements for a high school
credit.
The tabs read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Research, Lab Reports, Discussion Questions, Quiz
I also added these two books to our curriculum to beef it up
a bit. That Elements book is SO COOL!
This is what a typical week looks like for her.
Sometimes she will do experiments for the lab herself and sometimes I will have her watch a video of them being done. It all depends on her workload and availability of materials.
As I said, we're only a few weeks in, but so far so good!
*This is not a compensated review, nor are there any affiliate
links in this post. I’m just putting this review out there for any other
homeschooling parents that might be looking for a science alternative to
Apologia.
