Quark Chronicles - notebooking pages?

[LEK]

If you have used Quark Chronicles before, how important are the notebooking pages? From what I can tell the main book itself is just a story and all of the additional reading and learning happens in the additional notebooking pages, is this correct? I am seriously considering getting a bundle with the Quark Chronicles Zoology however from what I can see we will also need to have the notebooking pages, bought separately of course, to get the most out of this program which is an additional expense to consider before buying.

So, if you have used Quark Chronicles how essential do you feel the notebooking pages are? Are they additional to the main book or are they an essential component of the program?

[My4arrows]

I did not find the note booking pages useful at all. The book is great, but unless you want vocabulary picked out for you and a sheet to define them, there's not much else. There are a couple of books suggested, but they do not align with quarks chapters. I just finished botany with my kids (and we loved it) and as we read, I'd note different topics covered in the reading, pulling things from Pinterest, the library and materials I already had. It wasn't necessarily ideal but it worked really well and we learned a lot. For zoology, I've found a main text and we will use them together to compliment each other.

[She Reads a Lot]

We finished Quark Chronicles: Botany in December, and I enjoyed following the schedule in the notebooking pages that had us read other books after we finished each Quark chapter. My son loved Ellen McHenry's Botany in 8 Easy Lessons--so much so that we spent the past semester using her Elements book for Chemistry. Ds also enjoyed the DK encyclopedia of plants (really cool pictures) and I felt like both books lined up well with the Quark chapters.

 

True, we didn't worry about the experiments or the vocabulary b/c we're working so hard in Barton remediating dyslexia and I'm a weenie about experiments. But I still think it was worth the $$ to have the suggested other readings (we read other books suggested throughout the guide, too).

 

The notebooking pages break down suggested reading lists by grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, which I found very helpful. We like Quark and when I buy the Anatomy for the fall, I plan to get the notebooking pages for it, too.

 

Edited to fix a typo. Not a typo!!

Edited May 17, 2016 by She Reads a Lot