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Apologia or Elemental science??


Motsy802
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Apologia can be a bit much for 1st graders. I used it a bit with my oldest in first grade, and while he's advanced overall, he could only take it in VERY small chunks. By that summer, he was reading the books on his own and enjoying them. I used it some in 2nd grade, and it was a much better fit. My then-4 year old followed along some and enjoyed it (Astronomy), but I think the Zoo1-3 books would be way over his head. He likes looking at the pictures though! :D

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My 7 (first grader) and 4 (kindy) year olds just started Apologia Zoology 1 this week. So obviously I speak from great depths of experience. Ha.

 

We like it, but we're sort of bent toward science and they've already had exposure to some of the ideas from memorizing grammar & doing experiments for CC, and going on science oriented family trips (volcanos, oceans, frog hunts, etc). I'm pretty sure the lessons will take us more than 4 sessions to work through and it is THICK with info, but I'm cool with that.

 

I will be doing all the reading for a long while to come, though, because it's way above their level. We have found our monkeys actually zero in on a lesson much more when there's a bunch of meat there for them. Not sure if ES has that as well, but it sounds like it probably does. We like the notebook that came with our apologia text a LOT. Sounds like ES might have that part built in.

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I did Apologia last year with ds (first grade) and ended up hating it by about halfway through the year. It was just too heavy.

 

We switched to ES this year and really like it. I do tweak it a bit to work for us. Basically, it's a great outline and schedule, and if you don't like the books she uses you can sub in another on the same topic, or swap out experiments (or omit them). I also combine the classical series with some of the ES lapbooking stuff from currclick right now. It's working really well for ds at the 2nd grade level. And it's "neutral" in terms of evolution or creation (though the author is a creationist), so it's easy to grab resources in addition that work either way depending on your families beliefs. I really hated with apologia that some of her "extra reading" books were evolution in assumption and she gave no warning.

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We had Apologia and we kept the textbooks because they are good to just read and/or for reference but we made the switch to ES. We like it, it fits us better, using the different books, an experiment and a few notebooking pages. I think it might use it again in the future, perhaps together somehow....HTH.

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