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Ignore the messy buffet, would you? This post is not about my never-ending battle with clutter (will I EVER win? Doubtful.), it's about the fun new biology course the kids have been taking together! Experience Biology: Elementary from Journey Homeschool Academy hits every check box for whatever your homeschool philosophy might be. Engaging video lessons with no parent lectures necessary? Check! Living book recommendations to go along with each lesson? Check! Memory work and copywork? Check! Quizzes for optional use? Check! Easy activities with minimal parent prep work needed? Check!
I love (LOVE) that we can tailor this to what works for us - as a Charlotte Mason family, I'm not looking for tons of tests and quizzes to gauge understanding, since we rely on narration (telling back of what they just learned). But I know other families who want that tangible evidence of accomplishment, and there are plenty of printables to help with just that! Our library didn't have a ton of the recommended books available, but the ones we were able to find were really wonderful, and I so appreciate being able to have a variety of solid living books (books that teach organically, without being textbooks, specifically) to draw from, and I know that the books that are being recommended will be just right for our family.
The videos are fairly brief, about 15-20 minutes in length, with an optional memory video to continue with at the end of each lesson. I found this to be a perfect length for short lessons, and always had the kids tell me what they learned right afterwards in order to reinforce the lectures. Right now 16 weekly lessons have been published, with 30 total for the entirety of the course, being released one per week. So if your family began Experience Biology Elementary, this school year, you'd have plenty of time to get through all the lessons if you plan on doing one each week. But even if you work at a slower pace, you have lifetime access to the course, so you can take as long as you want, and use it again with subsequent children! Right now we're using it for Kindergarten-6th grade, with a preschooler tagging along.
The teacher challenged them to memorize the first 35 verses of Genesis
and all their eyes got big... Immediately Elizabeth (7) said, "I bet
Thorlak would be able to!!" Everybody else nodded their heads in
agreement, which cracked me up. Then they asked if the course would
mention St. Thorlak (who had all 150 Psalms memorized by the time he was
5)... I told them it was unlikely. I love that this is a Christian program, but that they don't attempt to explain the age of our planet - I know there's a fair amount of disagreement on that point, and they note that one of their recommended books states the earth is over 100 million years old, so parents who are teaching strict Creationism can avoid that particular title. In the first video, they explained that each day of creation could easily have been over 24 hours, because God can do anything! And that's as far as they dive into the origins of the universe.
Throughout the course, students will dive into topics related to plants, animals, cells, fungi, bacteria, and more... But we were most excited to do the DNA activity that was suggested with Chapter 3! Before I was able to get the supplies, my 11-year-old decided to make his own little diagram of the proteins that make up a strand of DNA. It got a lot more exciting once we added candy, though.
Lessons and extra resources are very easy to navigate using the user-friendly sidebar, and it's simple to track your progress!
In addition to the Experience Biology Elementary course (which you can preview here), you can also purchase Upper Level Biology (for high school students), Elementary Astronomy, and Upper Level Astronomy. We've really been enjoying our course!
Read more reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew here!
Hi Rosie! I'm Anshu Sharma, a graduate of TJHSST Class of 2017, and I first stumbled upon your blog and social media after reading your comments on your experiences with Beast Academy in the TJHSST alumni group. I am impressed by how deeply you care for your kids and their education!
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this post, I did have a question: what is the disagreement on the age of the Earth? I tried doing my own research but couldn't find anything substantive. My astrophysics text (An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics 2nd ed by Carroll and Ostlie) suggests that liquid oceans existed at least 2 billion years ago, and most scientific sources I found online peg Earth's age to be around 4.5 billion years.
Hi Anshu! There are some "Young Earthers" who take a strict Creationist view regarding the age of the earth, choosing to add up the years counted in the Bible as the only records of the existence of Earth, and the days of Creation as strict 24-hour days. By their calculations, the Earth is only several thousand years old, I believe? For us, faith and science go hand in hand, and I have never taken issue with scientific and archaeological estimates of dating.
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