What do you think of Berean builders science?

[bttrflynthesky]

I don't see a lot mention using this science curriculum.  It looks really good though.  

Anyone using it? Which one's have you used? What did you like/dislike about it?

I can't decide which one to try.  Did you have a favorite? 

[Taffy]

We've used Science in the Beginning and Science in the Ancient World.  I'm using it with 6th, 5th and 3rd grades - taught together.  LIKES:  Overall, the content is perfect for us (love the chronological approach and the Christian worldview), length of each lesson is on the shorter side (we average 45 minutes to read, experiment and journal), the number of lessons is manageable for the year (we do it twice per week), the experiments are good (easy and they generally work).  DISLIKES:  I find the text too wordy at times (I will edit as necessary in order to keep the lecture/conversation moving along; if I asked every rhetorical question in each lesson, we'd take forever to finish b/c my kids would jump at the opportunity to answer every question), the end-of-chapter questions are sometimes difficult for my kids to answer (my kids understand and can explain the concepts well, but they sometimes have a hard time answering the Older kids questions as they are framed - but maybe it's a problem with my kids and not the books).  

We started with the "Beginning" book and I'm planning to use the entire series.  Next year, my 6th grader will continue to listen to the lessons when I read, but he won't be required to journal each experiment because he will have a separate science curriculum for 7th grade (aimed at moving him toward more independence for middle school). 

Because the books move through the science chronologically, I think you should consider using the series in order - starting with Beginning.

[SoCal_Bear]

We really enjoyed it and will wrap up the series this coming year. You do have to be ok with it moving through chronologically as it will jump around from science topics as discoveries happened. It doesn't bother us though. For my science-loving son, the depth of the discussion was really good for him. The only one I did not use was Science in the Beginning. I taught the series in our co-op and built a lot of supporting resources around it in an online classroom so that I could use online videos to flesh it out more when I can approach the same topic with an engaging video.

 

 

[hollyhock2]

I've only used Science in the Beginning but we really enjoyed it. It was really good for my then 3rd, 5th and 7th graders, but it went right over my 1st grader's head. I loved the notebooking suggestions at the end of each lesson. The experiments at the beginning of each lesson were generally easy to do, but the best part about them was that we couldn't always predict what was going to happen, which was nice, and different from the science we'd previously used. The only thing I didn't like was that we were less enthusiastic about the second half of the book, but that's because we'd covered that material before, and that's not the book's fault. And I did get a little tired of doing an experiment every single time, but at least they were easy to do, so it wasn't too bad.