Noeo chemistry or apologia botany for first grade?

[staceyobu]

Our science will finish at the semester mark. I need to order something soon for the spring. Can anyone give me feedback on these two programs?

[....]

Hi, we just finished Apologia Botany yesterday. My 10 yro and 9 yro went through that textbook together. I probably wouldn't use it with a 1st grader unless they were really interested in botany and you were OK with bringing the content down to their level. And that might be what you're looking for. The Botany textbook is very good, but (and this is only my opinion) it's written for a middle school audience. There was stuff in there that I didn't know. :D

 

Also, it took us...let's see...8 or 9 months to get through it. :o We're also using another science text, so that's one of the reasons why it took so long. There is just a lot of reading.

 

If you use that textbook, the flower dissection lab was AWESOME. I bought jewelers loupes and the kids went crazy with those. They really learned a lot.

 

I had them do an end-of-year project. They chose 10 species of plants and made a Botanical Journal (it's the last chapter of the textbook). They did color pencil sketches of the plant, researched the scientific names and listed facts about the species.

 

If you decide to buy the botany book...or wait until later...it really was a neat textbook. My kids had a great time (and I did too).

 

Is there a homeschool store where you could flip through it?

[SebastianCat]

I did Apologia Botany with my DS when he was in 1st grade. This was before they had the notebooking journals to go along with the textbook. We mostly read the book, and did about half of the experiments.

 

My DS is now in 4th grade, and he STILL remembers a lot from this book. He loved it, and I'd say that if you take it at the child's pace, not too fast, a 1st grader can handle it.

 

I don't know if Apologia makes the "junior" notebooking journal for Botany, but I'd recommend that over the regular notebooking journal for a 1st grader. My DD is in 2nd grade and the regular journal is a lot of her this year.

 

I will tell you that by the end of the year, I was really, really tired of plants.

 

I don't know much about NOEO, but I would hesitate a bit about teaching chemistry in 1st grade. There are a lot of abstract concepts in chemistry that might be difficult to grasp at that level, depending on how it's presented.