Summer is here and we are enjoying it. The pool is up and the kids are swimming every day. Rose Bud will be going to camp soon. I'm having to mow the lawn about every 5 1/2 days with all the rain we've been getting.
And summer school is happening.
Actually, we've been at summer school since the beginning of May. We finished up Sonlight's Core 4 and packed it away. We made up our summer schedule which involves keeping up with math and writing in some way, finishing up any subjects that didn't quite get finished and SCIENCE!
Science: the bane of many homeschoolers' existence. Why is it that so many hsers neglect this subject, myself included? We've never finished a science curriculum in this house. Many years we've done only a smattering.
The kids like it. I don't mind the reading. I think it's the experiments. I know my frustration is that so often they don't work. You gather all the stuff together (substituting with a creative idea for that ONE item you don't have in the house) and the kids are left wondering how come the experiments never turn out.
On the docket for fall, however, was Sonlight's Science 5: The Human Body. I did complete a chunk of this with Rose Bud many years ago. The kids were excited.
Then I had the bright idea to do it this summer and get it out of the way.
So I purchased the few new pieces SL had added since we last did it along with a new instructor's guide (1/2 price, since I'd purchased one previously). And I added Apologia's Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and Physiology. Why? I don't know. I have yet to be successful with any of this series. We own Botany and Flying Things. Maybe my kids were too young when we tried them before.
So I don't know why I felt the need to spend money on yet another book in this series. Only I did. And we love it! It really would be excellent as a stand alone, but we are using it as a complement to SL's Science 5 and it is working beautifully.
We read through the SL readings in one or two days. The third day we read the corresponding chapter in Apologia. The kids are also making their insides using the pieces from My Body, so they color and cut out livers and intestines and brains and hearts. They glue them down on the life-size models we traced of their bodies on newsroll end paper I got for a dollar from our local newspaper printer years ago. We also do a few of the simpler experiments from the various books.
At this rate, we are able to go through about 3 weeks worth of the SL schedule in 2 weeks. I'm hoping to be able to finish the first 18 weeks this summer, assign the next 6 weeks as independent reading and then work through the History of Medicine book in the fall.
Banana Boy is doing the human body as well, but I made up a seperate schedule for him using books I had on hand. These include The BFC Young Book of the Body (a used-book purchase I got YEARS ago) which is our spine. We are following the topics in order of this book. We also read from DK's Picturepedia Your Body on the same topic (another long ago garage sale purchase). For experiments we use Play and Find Out: Human Body (rather preschoolish, but we don't read the text. I just use it for experiment ideas), and Healthy Me, Sense-Abilities, and Watch Me Grow for more experiments. I'm actually managing to keep his schedule simple and use books I already had on hand. I'm so proud of me! LOL
