BFSU Users--how long do you "do" each lesson?

[Aiden]

And if you do it for more than a single session, how do you extend it?

 

BFSU is the only science curriculum that my husband and I agree on--we both think its organization provides the best conceptual understanding of science (even though we'd be willing to go with a boxed curriculum instead, we can't agree on which one, so BFSU it is ... we think it's better anyway, just not as easy), and we want to use it with our daughter, beginning in fall 2015 when she's ready for kindergarten. I haven't ordered the book yet, but I have looked at the intro materials that are available for free with Amazon Kindle's preview program, and I've looked over the sample lesson available on Dr. Nebel's website.

 

I'm running into two problems, the second related to the first. The first problem is that I have to prep the lessons, materials, schedule, etc. all on my own--I see that the book has a good lesson outline, but this is no boxed science curriculum. I'm pretty sure I can handle it except for one aspect of it: the first book is supposed to be a curriculum for grades K-2, but in order for it to last that long, I'd need to do something like one lesson every three to four weeks--and the book's lesson plan wouldn't take anywhere near that long! So I assume that most of you who start at K and don't need to "catch up" supplement rather heavily.

 

What do you supplement with? How do you pick resources? How do you NOT finish the K-2 book in 1 or 1.5 years?

 

Thanks for any advice and encouragement you can provide! (I am already a part of the yahoo group, but it seems like most of the people there are concerned with "how quickly can I go through this to catch up," not "how do you make it last 3 years?")

[kiana]

I believe you can also re-visit lessons as appropriate for deeper understanding or when something interesting pops up in nature study.

[Eagle]

We started BFSU shortly before K and did ten or twelve lessons until about Christmas during his K year. Ds appeared to understand everything and was very interested. We then took a break for a few months to do some other things. During that time he read a lot of science books. In that time we also learned about lapbooks and notebooking. When we were scheduled to return to BFSU ds wanted to make a science notebook/lapbook entry for each lesson. But he was disappointed he didn't have pages for the chapters we had already completed. So we started again.

 

The second time through ds now has the ability to write down his findings, take photos of our experiments, and simply understand at a deeper level. He still remembers almost everything we did a year ago, but he brings a broader understanding this time. I am very glad that we started over. He also now has his own record of what he learned and he likes to flip through it to review.

 

What I would recommend for K is to spend your time reading science books together. Let's Read and Find Out, Robert Wells Science, some of the Usborne beginner books are science-based, and anything your dd finds interesting at the library. Do the experiments that some of the books give on their last page or two. We also watched a lot of documentaries and ds enjoyed his subscription to Brainpop Jr. For K I would also recommend the book "Teaching the Fun of Science to Young Learners". It is a basic introduction to the scientific method and gets children used to the idea that experiments produce data that they should record. We also enjoyed TOPS Lentil Science. It is perfect for K and a lot of fun.

 

As far as BFSU goes, we will have 6 sections finished before first grade (A/B1, A2, B2, A3, D1, C1). For first grade we will complete: A4, D3, D3A, A5, A5A, D4, D8, B3, D2, B4, B5, D5, D6, B4A, B4B (in that order). The remainder we will do in grade 2. For grade 1, the weeks we are not doing BFSU we will be doing more TOPS Lentil Science, some ScienceWiz kits, experiments from Exploratopia, and working on a science fair project.

 

We schedule a one hour block for BFSU, which does not include my prep time. If ds is particularly interested in the topic we will do more reading and experiments on a different day. The one hour does not always allow him to finish making his book pages, so those often end up being finished at a different time. BFSU works best if you continue to talk about the topics throughout the week, so be prepared to look for opportunities to revisit what you have covered.

[Tress]

Eagle's description sounds great and I sincerely hope BFSU will prove as delightfull for your daughter!

 

Be prepared, though, for your daughter to be finished with a lesson in 2 minutes flat, after you have spent a lot of time on preparations. Don't ask me how I know :glare: .

 

It could have been the lack of appropriate science books, as those are not available in Dutch here.

But it happened so often, after so many lessons, that it wasn't fun any more.

 

I still look wistfully at my BFSU 1-2-3 books in my book case. Maybe I'll try next year with my dd5 and dd7 :D.

 

Please, someone kick me now......

[Miss Tick]

I'm looking at this issue for the second book. Despite spending a full month on the lesson about density we worked through about half the book in third grade. I am leaning toward doing a science project in the spring, although I don't know of any local science fairs in the area.

 

So I'm planning a longer-term project, and also review of threads that we haven't explicitly studied in a while. For younger kids you could consider occasional longer term projects like butterfly lifecycle study, indoor plant growth experiments, decomposition studies, etc. that relate to what you are studying. It gives science a more leisurely feel and provides regular opportunities for discussing current topics even though some of the science "periods" may be short if you are checking status of projects.

[73349]

We will have finished it in a year and a summer at the rate of one a week. It is intended to be used anywhere from grades K through 2, not to take all the way through those years. I've used it as a spine, for "coverage," while we pursue DS's interests (mostly geology and astronomy) separately.

 

If a topic is interesting, you could definitely spend a month on it, with library books, field trips, more experiments, etc. It's meant to be as quick or as leisurely as your interest and prior knowledge dictate.

[Tanikit]

We did BFSU through K and are now halfway through first grade with about 9 lessons left to go. I never did plan in a detailed way as life tended to interfere. So some lessons we spent a week on and other 2-3 weeks and there were even those that we finished in a few days if my DD knew enough about the topic for us not to take it further - I still wanted to keep her interested so did not always cover every topic to its fullest extent (you never can anyway).

 

We did things based on my DDs interests at the time - so sometimes all she wanted was Magic school bus videos and other times we did a lot of crafts. Some sections lent themselves more easily to hands on and outdoors activities (experiments). We did plants in autumn so will probably revisit that in spring. Many of the lessons are year round lessons and so having discussed species I am more likely to point them out when visiting the zoo or when looking at books/web pages that have scientific names on them than I would have if it was a first glance at a page for other purposes, but we did not go into any great detail here when first visiting the topic. There are many websites we looked at, books that we read and games that we played also to extend thing if necessary - again very little of this was fully planned - and I am in a science field so adding these things to daily life is relatively easy.

 

We did also keep a notebook with some worksheets or print outs or even crushed rocks in it that my DD loves going back through to look at so when she is looking I check again what we have done and can add to it or revise it as needed.

 

 

[carriede]

We're starting it this year for K. My plan is to do 11 lessons in K, then 15 in 1st and 15 in 2nd. In K, I've planned to do one lesson every 3 weeks, SPREAD across those 3 weeks as appropriate.

 

We're also doing nature study once a week.

[lovinmomma]

Have any of you used BFSU for 3rd grade or higher? I used it for K/1st and we loved it OP. It's very hard to plan because it's much more lived than taught....it's hard to explain. Some lessons take a ton of time... others not so much. If you are one of those that really need a PLAN... you could plan time. Each week set aside a certain amount of time for BFSU, but there's really no way to know how long each unit will take you. I guess you could plan 1 section per month. That should give you relatively enough time. Sometimes you may be ahead and then you could do other things while you wait for the next lesson. I never planned BFSU. I just planned TIME for BFSU.

[aprilleigh]

What worked best for me was loosely listing the order I wanted to cover the lessons in (I say "loosely" because I agree with Dr Nebel's emphasis on taking advantage of teachable moments and shifting the schedule on-the-fly is sometimes necessary), and making sure I had the required materials for both the current lesson and the next two. I've only been caught with my pants down once, and that was because I shifted a lesson up at the last minute thinking I had everything I needed when I didn't.

 

As a rule I schedule time for science, but I adjust that as needed. If the topic is not grabbing DS, which frequently happens when he's already familiar with it, we move faster than the book suggests, but if it's new or of particular interest to him we often spend 2-3 times as long as the book suggests and explore it in depth with library books and mom's personal knowledge (I'm a biology professor, but have studied or done significant reading in most of the major sciences at various points purely for personal interest).

 

If this still results in completing the curriculum before completing grade 2, you can supplement with various science kits covering topics that were of particular interest, or you can use any of Janice VanCleave's science books. There are numerous other titles available from other authors that also cover science experiments for kids, as well.

[Aiden]

Eagle's description sounds great and I sincerely hope BFSU will prove as delightfull for your daughter!

 

Be prepared, though, for your daughter to be finished with a lesson in 2 minutes flat, after you have spent a lot of time on preparations. Don't ask me how I know :glare: .

 

It could have been the lack of appropriate science books, as those are not available in Dutch here.

But it happened so often, after so many lessons, that it wasn't fun any more.

 

I still look wistfully at my BFSU 1-2-3 books in my book case. Maybe I'll try next year with my dd5 and dd7 :D.

 

Please, someone kick me now......

 

I'm concerned about a lack of books as well. We speak English and smatterings of other languages, but really, only English. When we start this curriculum, we will have just arrived in Athens, Greece, after spending the summer in the US, after having spent two years in Prishtina, Kosovo (where we are now). I'm in the very early phases of trying to learn Greek, but there's no way we'll be able to use Greek resources in school, and I don't know yet if there is an English-language library with educational kids books to which I'll have access.

 

Our current plan is to do as much planning as possible for kindergarten before the end of this year--early next year will be consumed with getting ready to leave here. Then, next summer in the States, I'll have all my records from this year's planning, and I'll (hopefully) be able to go to a homeschool convention and lay hands on the curricula I'm leaning toward, visit libraries to preview books in various subjects, and make final decisions about what to buy and bring with us to Greece. I will have access to US mail once we're there, so I'll be able to order more later if needed, but ... it's going to get awfully expensive, buying everything if there's no library we can use.

 

<sigh> Off to finish reading responses ...

[carriede]

And if you do it for more than a single session, how do you extend it?

 

BFSU is the only science curriculum that my husband and I agree on--we both think its organization provides the best conceptual understanding of science (even though we'd be willing to go with a boxed curriculum instead, we can't agree on which one, so BFSU it is ... we think it's better anyway, just not as easy), and we want to use it with our daughter, beginning in fall 2015 when she's ready for kindergarten. I haven't ordered the book yet, but I have looked at the intro materials that are available for free with Amazon Kindle's preview program, and I've looked over the sample lesson available on Dr. Nebel's website.

 

I'm running into two problems, the second related to the first. The first problem is that I have to prep the lessons, materials, schedule, etc. all on my own--I see that the book has a good lesson outline, but this is no boxed science curriculum. I'm pretty sure I can handle it except for one aspect of it: the first book is supposed to be a curriculum for grades K-2, but in order for it to last that long, I'd need to do something like one lesson every three to four weeks--and the book's lesson plan wouldn't take anywhere near that long! So I assume that most of you who start at K and don't need to "catch up" supplement rather heavily.

 

What do you supplement with? How do you pick resources? How do you NOT finish the K-2 book in 1 or 1.5 years?

 

Thanks for any advice and encouragement you can provide! (I am already a part of the yahoo group, but it seems like most of the people there are concerned with "how quickly can I go through this to catch up," not "how do you make it last 3 years?")

There's also a Yahoo group for BFSU where many experienced parents and the author himself will answer your questions. I don't have a link for it right now, but you can find it easily on Yahoo.

[Syllieann]

We spend about 2 weeks per topic. I plan an activity or demonstration once per week with about 30 min in mind. The other days we review with the teachable moments or reading the recommended books. Before beginning a new lesson, I look at the pre req's and we discuss all the questions/objectives associated with those lessons. That might be its own session, depending on where you are in the book. The identification of living things lesson could potentially last forever. We work to identify new species when we encounter them. The number of plant and insect species in a single backyard is astounding.

[Tracy]

At that age, it is not hard at all to extend a lesson for 2-3 weeks.  Attention spans are very short, and even when my dd was highly interested, we rarely could get through a lesson in one day.  We never supplemented, and we still needed at least 2 weeks for each lesson.  

[Aiden]

We spend about 2 weeks per topic. I plan an activity or demonstration once per week with about 30 min in mind. The other days we review with the teachable moments or reading the recommended books. Before beginning a new lesson, I look at the pre req's and we discuss all the questions/objectives associated with those lessons. That might be its own session, depending on where you are in the book. The identification of living things lesson could potentially last forever. We work to identify new species when we encounter them. The number of plant and insect species in a single backyard is astounding.

 

This sounds good to me--I especially like the idea of dedicating time to review rather than just flying through that part and assuming she really does remember it. Where do you find the ideas for the demonstrations and activities, though? My copy of the book hasn't arrived yet, so I've only seen the one sample lesson, but it looks like there's only one per lesson in the curriculum. Do you find the others online, or is there a book or two that you've found useful for that?

[Aiden]

At that age, it is not hard at all to extend a lesson for 2-3 weeks.  Attention spans are very short, and even when my dd was highly interested, we rarely could get through a lesson in one day.  We never supplemented, and we still needed at least 2 weeks for each lesson.  

 

The only lesson I've seen is the first one, available as a sample. (I've ordered the book, but it hasn't arrived yet and won't for a while--I'm outside the US, and it may not even ship for 2-3 weeks, according to Amazon.) It seems like it would be doable to spread that first lesson over two weeks, but not necessarily interesting--it would be a matter of categorizing anything and everything for a couple of weeks, which may get a bit old. Are the later lessons more involved and/or more easily spread out?

[Syllieann]

This sounds good to me--I especially like the idea of dedicating time to review rather than just flying through that part and assuming she really does remember it. Where do you find the ideas for the demonstrations and activities, though? My copy of the book hasn't arrived yet, so I've only seen the one sample lesson, but it looks like there's only one per lesson in the curriculum. Do you find the others online, or is there a book or two that you've found useful for that?

I use the activities in the book. Some of the follow up things, such as making a book or constructing a map of biomes, would be done in our weekly session. Many of the lessons, especially a little later, contain two parts, so that fits nicely into the once per week framework.

[sagira]

We did BFSU in 3 years, then BFSU 2 in another 3 years. Next year (6th grade) we're starting BFSU 3 and finishing in 8th grade. I get supplemental books from the library and we watch Bill Nye the Science Guy videos and others. Ds10 loves, loves the Eureka! Videos you get on NeoK12.

[Tracy]

This sounds good to me--I especially like the idea of dedicating time to review rather than just flying through that part and assuming she really does remember it. Where do you find the ideas for the demonstrations and activities, though? My copy of the book hasn't arrived yet, so I've only seen the one sample lesson, but it looks like there's only one per lesson in the curriculum. Do you find the others online, or is there a book or two that you've found useful for that?

 

The first lesson (your sample) is not a very good representative of lessons.  It is just the foundation, something you want to continue to reinforce throughout other lessons.  The rest of the lessons are substantially longer and usually have more than one demo/activity.  There are also supplemental writing activities and book lists for each lesson.

[daijobu]

If you want to extend BFSU as long as possible, I agree with PPs about Bill Nye and other videos and books you might find at your library.  

 

Also the internet is your friend here.  Put the lesson topics into your search engine or into youtube search.  You'll see lots of alternative experiments and demonstrations to further and deepen their understanding.  

 

You can also have your kids create posters or videos, etc. to show their understanding.  Keep an eye out for museum exhibits near home or when you are traveling.  The book Exploratopia also dovetails nicely with some lessons in BFSU1.

 

Finally, don't pay attention to the grade level listed.  If your kids are ready for BFSU2, then why wait?  If they aren't, you can proceed at a leisurely pace through both books, supplementing and reviewing as needed.  

[pollyanna]

I also love BFSU.

 

I spent about 2y slopwly working through the material with my oldest. She's curious, but her interest in science waxes and wanes. WE might do 10 lessons in 12 weeks, then we go on a trip and take a break and by the time we're back to schoolwork, she's super interested in poetry, or cursive writing, or asking a lot about history.

 

When the interest was there, we did run with science, using BFSU as a starting point. I have a science background and enjoy the field in general, so I could go on and on for days on any of the lessons:) Nebel encourages linking writing with his science curriculum, so we made a number of books (life cycle of a frog leads to child making a book about the life cycle of birds, daisies, people, etc).

 

It just... fills up. I don't start a new topic unless we're over the last one. Some lessons bleed right into the next, so we could easily cover 2 or three lessons in a short time. It works out. She's young, its about exposeure and creating a basis for future ordering and wonder for your child right now!

[Aiden]

If you want to extend BFSU as long as possible, I agree with PPs about Bill Nye and other videos and books you might find at your library.  

 

Also the internet is your friend here.  Put the lesson topics into your search engine or into youtube search.  You'll see lots of alternative experiments and demonstrations to further and deepen their understanding.  

 

You can also have your kids create posters or videos, etc. to show their understanding.  Keep an eye out for museum exhibits near home or when you are traveling.  The book Exploratopia also dovetails nicely with some lessons in BFSU1.

 

Finally, don't pay attention to the grade level listed.  If your kids are ready for BFSU2, then why wait?  If they aren't, you can proceed at a leisurely pace through both books, supplementing and reviewing as needed.  

 

Exploratopia looks amazing! Thanks for that idea.

[Aiden]

Thank you, everyone! I ordered BFSU and am eagerly awaiting its arrival--it should arrive in a month, give or take. I won't start using it for another year, but I intend to use some time this year to look through it and start planning for any supplemental materials I'll need to buy, so I can look for/at them next summer when I'm in the States.

[Guest Kimmyel]

There is apparently a second edition of Book 1 coming out in September with apparently 2 extra lessons. Also there will be a new website and maybe a printable pdf of the 2nd edition available then as well. 

[Aiden]

There is apparently a second edition of Book 1 coming out in September with apparently 2 extra lessons. Also there will be a new website and maybe a printable pdf of the 2nd edition available then as well.

Yes, I saw that on the Yahoo group. I've already ordered the first edition, though if I hadn't, I would have waited until September when the new one will be available. But his web developer did say there would be a free 30-day trial for the online version, and he encouraged those who already have the first edition to join for those 30 days and print out the two additional lessons, as well as look around the site to see if we wanted to subscribe. I think that will be my plan for now: print the two new lessons and look around to see if I might want to subscribe later, but let the free trial lapse since it'll be a while before I start on it.

[CrunchyGirl]

I don't suppose there's any hope he's going to put out kits for those of us who are challenged in the household items department?

[Jackie]

I'm just starting, only about four lessons in. I do plan on spreading it out over three years and heavily supplementing. We like videos from The Happy Scientist, The Private Eye curriculum, and Lego Education materials. More directly tied to BFSU, I've lined up some of the Magic School Bus episodes. We'll read a lot of the suggested reading from BFSU. Delta's Science in a Nutshell kits line up really well with BFSU for topics, so I'm going to try those and see if they'll work for my science-oriented DD. Science is hands-down her favorite subject and there is no one curriculum that would keep her science appetite sated, so it is a matter of combining and using BFSU as more of a spine.

[Aiden]

I don't suppose there's any hope he's going to put out kits for those of us who are challenged in the household items department?

No mention of that, unfortunately. I'm unlikely to subscribe to a website, but I'd love to buy a materials kit!

[Courtney_Ostaff]

http://fromtherootsup.blogspot.com/2011/10/bfsu-flowcharts.html 

 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7syhYPGrYVLeXpraEhIRE5QZkU/edit?pli=1

 

 

[Aiden]

http://fromtherootsup.blogspot.com/2011/10/bfsu-flowcharts.html

 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7syhYPGrYVLeXpraEhIRE5QZkU/edit?pli=1

 

I've seen that first link before, and it's very useful. That second one--wow, that's a gold mine! Thank you!