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Burned Out on Apologia Astronomy


skeeterbug
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This was one of my concerns with Apologia...I am so over astronomy. I think we are halfway through the book. It's great to study it so in-depth, but we are burned out on it and I am just not wanting to pick it up again. Sigh.

 

So this is what I am thinking...have several of the Apologia books ready to go and then when we get bored with one we can pick up one of the others and work in it until we get burned out on that one. Rotate through them at will. Anyone done this?

 

I'm kind of over Apologia myself, but my son still loves it and loves the notebooking journal. He wants to complete all of them eventually, and wouldn't that be a cool collection to have at the end of elementary?

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Could you switch between books. 6 weeks Astronomy, 6 weeks Zoology, 6 weeks Botany, then go back to the start?

 

I've considered doing this myself, & as much as I love the concept of Apologia we're moving away from it. :blushing: I just find that it's hard to fit in because it's SO long. As in, each lesson can take so long.

 

I'm planning to move to SL science. I know, I know.. but it's what I think will really work for us right now.

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It's fine to rotate. I leave all the books out for my son to peruse as he sees fit. We did part of Astronomy with the notebooking journal, but now we're doing just library books. DS can still read the Apologia books anytime, plus we use them as a reference sometimes if we want to learn about a particular item that is talked about in there.

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:iagree:I am so with you! I have such a hard time getting through them and we have never finished a book in a year (we have used 3 of them)! I love the info in them, and my kids adore them. But they just take us SO long. My girls in 3rd and 5th grade will be doing one this year and I am hoping they can do it more independently and together- we shall see!

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Could you switch between books. 6 weeks Astronomy, 6 weeks Zoology, 6 weeks Botany, then go back to the start?

 

I've considered doing this myself, & as much as I love the concept of Apologia we're moving away from it. :blushing: I just find that it's hard to fit in because it's SO long. As in, each lesson can take so long.

 

I'm planning to move to SL science. I know, I know.. but it's what I think will really work for us right now.

 

 

All I can say is that the SL Science is the one that gets done at our house. None of the other programs do. So even though people here don't seem to like it, I do.

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Read alouds at the dinner table, are a way to "do" a chapter, with no pain.

 

I'm using more and more textbooks as read alouds. I don't buy the TMs or any of the kits, activities, or extras. I just READ the book or have the student READ the book.

 

:iagree: We did that. I was so over astronomy so we just read through it a chapter at a time, no extras. We are now reading through swimming creatures before moving on to human anatomy.

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I'm planning to move to SL science. I know, I know.. but it's what I think will really work for us right now.

 

All I can say is that the SL Science is the one that gets done at our house. None of the other programs do. So even though people here don't seem to like it, I do.

 

I've tried SL science and I'm one of those who doesn't like it...their schedule and the worksheets. But I do like (and own) the books and the D&Do Dvds. They're just for fun.

 

What if you speed it up and do one book per semester instead of taking a full year for each? That's how the core "box" curriculum that we use schedules it.... two sciences per year.

 

I think this is what I'm going to have to do. It just requires more effort on my part. :tongue_smilie:

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We also did Apologia Astronomy in one semester and we enjoyed doing it. We did most of the science experiments also and picked and chose from the note booking journal (with a 3rd & 5th grader).

 

We'll be doing Apologia Botany this year. A friend who just did it last school year really enjoyed it, so I'm trying not to go into it with a negative attitude. :sleep:

 

We'll also be doing Botany in one semester.

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We did Apologia Astronomy last year, and I really liked it. At the end of the year, though, I was very glad to be finished. I learned more about Astronomy in one year, than I did when I was in grade school!

I never finished the last chapter though. Just too much! :D Couldn't make myself. I was sooo done.

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We have done a few chapters out of other books other years and always dropped it b/c I would do a major overhaul each year in our curriculum and topics. This year we started Anatomy and got 4 chapters in and dropped it because we didn't have enough time and by the end of the day they did not feel like reading such technical material and doing the notebooking, which I really wanted them to do.

 

So I swore we would do it this summer and we forced our way through. By the end they had to read the chapter themselves and then come take the "test" orally with me and then do the pages themselves. I was much less picky about what their pages looked like and there were even a few we skipped. There were several chapters I didn't test my oldest on and I have yet to go back and see if there is anything else we need to finish up. There are many of the experiments we didn't do yet either. I am going to try to make myself but we'll see if we actually do it.

 

This is also something I struggle with because my kids will be using Apologia in middle and high school so I love the idea of them doing the whole series but it was hard to get through all that. I think what I want to try to do is have my kids do it independently like we did towards the end, but only in grades 4-6 doing two books a summer. But in the younger years I'm either just going to read it to them as a read aloud as Hunter suggested or I'm just going to do science with Usborne books and other picture books.

 

During the school year we do CC so we're using the Acts and Facts cards for memory work. My plan this year is to have my older ones read the back of the cards and do some copywork from it with an illustration and then narrate a few sentences from it. I just want to keep it simple. They will also write experiment reports from the experiments we do in CC and other than that they will just do some nature study 1-3 days a week when we finish our other reports. But in the summer I want to dive in more.

 

Sometimes I think some good movies and audios (like Jonathan Park) are the way to fill in extra info in the younger years in a way that is still really enjoyable.......

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