Posted by Laura in MO on 13:54 Sep 17
In Reply to: Science spine recommendations...unnecessarily long, sorry posted by Melissa in the desert
Hi Melissa! We tried doing the homeschool method of science through 2nd grade. My kids have a great interest in science, as do so many children this age. However, I felt as if it were too unstructured, and perhaps not following a logical sequence. Last year, I purchased Harcourt Science's text and workbook for third grade, and also their Health text and workbook. It went so well last year, that we will be completing the 3rd grade science text and beginning the 4th soon. For myself, I love having the text as a spine, pulling in other reading materials, and science videos as needed. I know that some homeschoolers look down on texts, especially used alone, because often they give lots of bits of information without going in depth. When the text is used as a spine, I don't see that it is any different than using Story of the World as a spine while pulling in other resources (which we do) or using a TOG spine and pulling in other resources (which we also do). I know that some may disagree here, but we've done this over a year now with science. We pull in a great deal of other resources, and it is truly similar to using our history spines. For us, having it laid out in a spine has made all the difference between an average science program and an excellent one. I'm sure there are lots of excellent homeschool science programs out there, I just hadn't found them :)
If you are thinking of a text spine, look at different texts to see what you think will suit your needs. If that is not an option, this link will allow you to search the Table of Contents of many science texts.
http://enc.org/resources/?ls=sn
Perhaps the websites of the major text publishers will help also. Here is Harcourt's website:
https://jstore.harcourtschool.com/marketplace/index.html
Harcourt's website also has samples of their texts (I'll bet some other publishers do as well):
http://www.harcourtschool.com/menus/preview/harcourt_science2/preview_menu.html
BTW Harcourt has a lot of experiments and a nice workbook to go with the text. The experiments are fun, pertinent, and emphasize a true scientific method.
HTH!
Laura in MO