Ah, science. One of the subjects many new homeschoolers stress over. "I can't teach science-I don't have the equipment and it's too expensive." "I can't teach science, it's too hard."
Enter Eagles Wings Considering God's Creation for elementary school. Considering God's Creation is a two book curriculum that covers a wide range of science topics. Here is a list of the topics covered in this curriculum (taken from their website):
Creation
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The curriculum comes with a Teacher's Manual and workbook filled with reproducible activities.
You do not need to start at lesson one-you choose the subject you want to cover and begin at the first lesson for that subject. We chose to do the lessons on weather. There is a section in the Teacher's Manual for you to read to your children and then generally a simple experiment or an activity to do from the workbook. The experiments use common household items-most found in your kitchen. In addition, there are Bible tie-in's. Of course, this is something we love!
There isn't a lot of prep work for the teacher. You do want to look the lesson over a day or two early just in case you don't have something for a project. (In the weather lesson, we needed eggs. I was stocked up but if not, it would have been simple to run to the store for a dozen.) Although there isn't much prep work, the way this curriculum is written, it seems to be intended for the parent to read aloud to the children. It's not designed necessarily to have your child work on their own. That said, I think older children could just read from the teacher's manual on their own and do the activities without supervision, as long as the parent took a quick look at it ahead of time.
This curriculum is geared towards 2nd-7th grade and you could easily teach all your elementary students at the same time. You could use this with older children if you use some of the suggested activities to expand the lessons and with younger children, giving them extra help.
The books come with a CD with songs on it for each of the units. The songs are definitely geared towards younger ages, in my opinion. My 9 year old and 11 year didn't really want to listen to the CD but I think most 5 year olds would enjoy it.
You could easily take a couple of years to go through this curriculum especially if you use some of the expanded activity suggestions. They include things like researching a scientist, going on a field trip, making a "bug zoo" or further researching the subject itself.
At the end of each unit is a crossword puzzle for the children to do as a test.
The curriculum itself is pretty basic. I didn't feel this was an in-depth science curriculum, delving deep into the subjects, but I think for elementary school, it was just the right amount of information. Plus the lessons had "Digging Deeper" sections with ideas for looking into the subjects in more depth. You could use this curriculum on its own or you could use it to supplement your current science curriculum.
We put the workbook pages in a notebook and used them as a notebooking activity. You can go here to see more examples of the pages in the workbook. Overall, the kids and I enjoyed the unit we studied. We have a science curriculum we have used for many years but I will now be pulling out Considering God's Creation to use along side with it. Considering God's Creation costs $29.95 and you could order extra workbooks for your students for $13.95 if you didn't want to copy the pages in the workbook.
Go here to see what my fellow crewmates had to say about Considering God's Creation.
(I received a free copy of Considering God's Creation in exchange for my honest opinion. No other compensation was received.)
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