I can't believe how blessed I am to be able to review homeschool curricula! I just marvel everyday at this amazing opportunity I have been given. Not only do I get to feed my curriculum habit but I get to share those findings with all of you. Hopefully there would be something that would assist you on your journey of homeschooling.
Products such as the one we just got done reviewing. This wonderful product is from
Bright Ideas Press. I received
Christian Kids Explore Chemistry to review and I am so glad I did. This is a great book and we can't wait to finish with it and start on the next one!
Here is a little about the book from the
Bright Ideas Press website:
I
ncluded in this book:
30 Lessons in five units
Hands-On Activities: including making model atoms, breaking covalent bonds, and making gas expand.
Chemistry Terms, Notations, and Rules
Unit Reviews
Supplemental Book List
Coloring pages
This is all you need to teach a strong, basic chemistry course for Junior high and upper elementary students.
Organized and easy-to-use!
Grades 4 – 8, 384 pages.
This book retails for $34.95.
Tired of making photocopies or skipping activities because you don’t have the pages ready for your students to work on? We’ve taken every possible reproducible page from CKEC and turned them into one printable digital download for you. Make as many or few copies for your entire family: Review-its, Wrap-ups, Coloring pages, Activity and Experiment forms are all there.
Print it out and get the MOST out of this great science curriculum!
This item is a download and retails for $12.95
Now, I will tell you what we as a family thought about this curriculum. We loved it! My 11yo daughter was the primary user of this book and she was able to use it on her own. It is well written for this age group and breaks down Chemistry concepts into bite-sized pieces allowing students to understand them. My daughter really enjoyed the lessons and has already learned and retained the information in the first few lessons.
Each lesson has vocabulary words to learn, the text of the lesson to read called Teaching Time, a Review It section, and a Hands On experiment to solidify the concepts just learned. There are also questions called Think about it that sum up the lesson and experiment. It is a great format that really helps the student to learn the material given.
In the beginning of the book there is a section on how to use the book that was very helpful for me as a parent but also helpful to my daughter to read so that she could see how each section was important and needed to be completed. At the beginning of each unit there is a vocabulary word list, materials needed for the unit list, and a list of concepts that the student should understand by the end of the unit. Again, this was something tangible that my daughter could check back with to make sure she was understanding what she was supposed to.
This book is divided into Five Units-The Basics of Chemistry, Atoms and Molecules, The Nature of Chemistry, States of Matter, and Organic Chemistry. There is a glossary, coloring pages, the Element Tables, resource list, and Unit Wrap Ups that we used as tests. This book is full of so many great things that it's hard to list them all! The Activity CD has everything you need to print off for the student to have the worksheets for the activity questions, the experiments, and everything else they need to complete the curriculum.
If you are looking for a flashy, brightly colored book for science this isn't it. However, if you are looking for a solid science book that will help your child understand the basics of science this is for you. The pages/pictures are all black and white so they do not distract the student from the reading material. Simple and clean is the way my daughter described it. I think that's a very good description!
Here is more of what she thought:
"Ever since I can remember I have wanted to do hands on projects and this lets me do it at the end of every lesson. It explains everything really well and I understand it. It is fun and interesting." S age 11, 6th grade
We have so enjoyed using this book and would recommend it highly.
If you want to see what else
Bright Ideas Press has to offer, and there is quite a bit, head on over and check them out.
If you want to see what other
Crew Members thought about it, head on over to the
Crew Blog and check them out.
**I received this book from Bright Ideas Press through TOS Review Crew in exchange for my honest review.
