Any thoughts on Apologia's Expl Creation w/Chemistry and Physics (for elementary)

[provenance61]

This is a fairly new title, but has anyone used or seen feedback on it?  I'm looking at it for next year.  3rd and 4th graders.

 

Any feedback or links to other threads appreciated!!!

 

 

[Guest Patty5]

Hi,

I haven't read it, but my 12 yo son is reading it and loves it.  He is 3/4 of the way through it, he says it's really interesting and often reads more than assigned.  He wrote a 5 paragraph paper comparing Renewable energy and it was really interesting.  I did read over that subject before he wrote so I would know what it said in the book.

Not sure if that helps.

[SebastianCat]

My almost 11 yo DD just finished it for her 5th grade year.   I'd say it's comparable in difficulty to the elementary Anatomy & Physiology, and would be best for kids in upper elementary ages, or even early middle school.  The concepts in this book are more abstract than those covered in the botany or zoology books.   If you have a kid who loves science and can handle the abstract concepts, it might be OK for a 3rd grader, but otherwise I'd probably wait for 5th or 6th grade.

[Literary Mom]

I posted this in an older thread as well, just now:

 

We actually have been using this all year and it's been a mixed bag. It is more challenging, akin to the level of their anatomy & physiology book, which was why we did it over a whole year instead of a semester like we usually do. But the biggest challenge was getting my kids interested in this topic. There were glimmers of that, but on the whole, it didn't grab them. They preferred the chemistry chapters (which we supplemented with Basher's periodic table book and another periodic table book - the beautiful coffee table one with all the pictures) to the physics chapters (which also were harder to understand). The experiments were usually either not stuff they wanted to do or they didn't work (our kit was sometimes inferior, so in fairness, that could have been part of the problem...as well as my ineptness in this area!), but we did have a few successes.

 

Despite the "meh" response to the book, I do think they learned a lot from it, and I'm not convinced another curriculum would have been more effective. We did study chemistry four years ago using Elemental Science and I preferred this to that.

 

I also think that because we've done the whole Apologia Young Explorers series, we may just be ready for a fresh, new approach...which is why we're breaking out of the four year science cycle and will be using Jay Wile's Science in the Beginning for this next school year.

 

(Btw, my kids are 12, 10, 8, and I used it with all three, though I usually had my oldest write more, and she - with her technical mind - was good at explaining the concepts to her younger siblings when we discussed the chapter review questions)