Apologia Physical Science...notebook or not?

[Janeway]

We are not religious but do not mind biblical references. I skipped over the notebooks for the elementary ages because it felt like it spent a fair amount of time on copying bible verses. I have only seen the small sample of the Physical Science one. Would the notebook be a waste for me? I have the 2nd edition book and I know the last person who used it had it before Apologia started making workbooks. Would the preprinted notebook make it easier to implement the program, or would it simply give me more work and put too much bible verse copying or such in there?

[...................]

I have the General and Buology and there's no BIble stuff that I can see.

 

As to whether it's helpful, it does give you a schedule and I think it's super helpful especially if your kids haven't used textbooks before. I am super super glad I bought the General Notebook for my 7th grader who is more distract able and not as. Organized.

 

I feel it's a waste and maybe even a hinderence for my 9th grader as he need to continue his own note taking, binder keeping and organization skills. Not sure he will use it at all.

 

 

Hope that helps.

[mckive6]

My ds and dd are using it.  There are 3 sections. Each module has all the On Our Owns and space to write the answer, the study guide with room to write, and graphic organizers for concepts.  There is a section for the experiments, and lab reports.  There are 2 bible verses mixed in with the introduction to how to do the experiments, but that is all I've seen in the notebook. The last section is summaries,  fill-in-the-blank questions like a study guide. There is one for each chapter. 

 

We like it.  It helps my dd who needs the white space, and helps make it independent for my ds, 6th grade.  I hope that helps.

 

 

[2_girls_mommy]

I didn't even know they had the notebooks for the older books.  My younger child loves the elementary ones. My older child started physical science in 7th and did biology in 8th, both without the notebook.  She did the On Your Own questions and wrote definitions each week, and did the study guide for each chapter. 

 

We did have the class at a co-op, so the co-op teacher wrote the schedule for us, and did the labs in her class.  She had some preprinted lab sheets that she handed out for the kids to fill out, and did the tests in class.

 

So it would have taken me more time to go through the book and figure out which chapters would be 2 week chapters and which could be done in one.  It sounds like that would be one advantage to the notebooks- having the schedule already done for you.

 

But it also sounds like a lot of $ for the same things my dd did on notebook paper. (some might say that about the elementary notebooks too, but I think they have more in them that my dd appreciated, like the cut/paste activities, and it really helps her to make her work more artistic.

[Momto6inIN]

The Biblical references in the General Science and Physical Science notebooks are minimal. If you can comfortably use the textbooks, then the notebooks shouldn't be a problem.

 

At first I resisted buying them because there wasn't really anything in them we couldn't have done ourselves. But they really helped my perpetually disorganized DS figure out how to read and take notes from a textbook and then how to study the information in the text. They organized his work in a way just keeping a notebook with the same info never could have done.

 

And from the opposite perspective, my uber-organized DD is also looking forward to using them because they have a schedule and the pages are all laid out nice and neat and it makes her little compartmentalized brain feel like it's in its happy place LOL

 

So it's a win-win for us :)

[MerryAtHope]

We've been using the levels as they create the notebooks, so we haven't been able to use one until this year. I saw my friend's one for Physical Science a few years ago--what a wonderful tool! There are pages for general note-taking, and all of the On Your Own questions and review questions are right in the notebook with plenty of space for writing in answers. There are also lab report forms, and other helps included. Yes, we've done all of this with regular spiral notebooks through Physics--but my dd is really happy about being able to use one of the notebooks for Advanced Bio this year!