Do you use a science encyclopedia?

[cintinative]

I have two and I have never used them in our six years of homeschooling. What am I missing?

 

I am thinking of clearing them off my shelf unless you all tell me I will want them next year for essays or something . . .  =)

[Insertcreativenamehere]

I use Mystery Science for my 2nd and 5th grader and sometimes, I need to beef things up for my 5th grader. I often have him read the relevant material in the encyclopedia and give an oral or written narration. I'm also using it to teach him how to take notes from a text. 

[EKS]

I had something like three Kingfisher encyclopedias, history, science, and geography (I think).  I never used any of them in 13 years of homeschooling.

Edited November 27, 2017 by EKS

[2_girls_mommy]

We did the years we did WTM style science, which I much prefer to textbook science. It was our textbook. I often still use it in summers before co-op starts. Co-op is where my kids do their main science classes. They do all labs and reports there and follow the assigned textbook at home for work. Those books have all of the definitions in them that the kids need and plenty of reading. 

 

But sometimes in summers or in the months before co-op starts we will do a unit on our own. Then we use our KSE. I honestly could use just the encyclopedia with living books for a full science curric before high school and wish that we did it that way. It is just that I can't pass up the classes that are offered at co-op because of the great labs and teacher who really knows her stuff. 

 

Also in the past, when kids were younger, I used the encyclopedias to pull dictation sentences from. And also, my kids have certain times of the day for assigned reading. My dyslexic will get assigned 1 hr of reading, 15 min from 4 different books. One has to be science. One has to be poetry. One has to be from her current assigned lit book. And one is free choice. (This is just something we do that works well for us.) I let her pick what she reads for science. Last year she picked an animal science encyclopedia. She read from that all year and took notes from it and drew diagrams from it on top of her co-op science textbook.  

 

So for us, having a variety of reference books on hand is useful. 

[ScoutTN]

Only for reference purposes. 

[MerryAtHope]

They were helpful reference materials here, mainly for science fair reports to round out the sources (or sometimes to get us started on the right track before getting to the library) but sometimes for random questions.