Posted by Reya on 4:49 Sep 18
In Reply to: Science spine recommendations...unnecessarily long, sorry posted by Melissa in the desert
http://www.theyoungscientistsclub.com/ I haven't tried it yet but have heard good things.
I have the Kingfisher science encyc. and am pretty thorougly disgusted with it. The pictures are GORGEOUS, but the writing is very, very poor and the entries are riddled with mis-statements and outright errors. Kingfisher is actually owned by a primary-level division of a textbook company, and it shows, and not in a good way.
I'm not going to have a true "spine" ever. I'm going to organize the studies around different areas of concentration instead.
Right now, we're using Eyewitness Juniors and Explorers (they have fewer pictures, BTW, and the pages are more focused than the big Eyewitness books), Rookie Read-About Science (VERY short and VERY pricey for its size new--with even a "regular" student, I think that any grade beyond 1st is too old), Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science, and books by Gail Gibbons and Seymour Simon.
The Rookie books and Seymour Simon usually have one page of text opposite one very attractive photograph. They're more or less in the same spirit, though Simon is much more advanced--3-4 grade rather than K-1, and it's serious stuff presented in a clear way for kids. He often talks about evolution, if that's an issue.
The Gail Gibbons and Let's-Read... series have catoonish, full-color illustrations on each page and accompanying text. The science is solid and more narrative-based than factoid-based. I think that Gibbons is more for the pre-K-1st/2nd? crowd. (Grade level, not age, of course.) The Let's-Read... series has two different levels. Level one is for pre-K-1st, and level 2 is for advanced 1st-2nd, maybe 3rd.
I actually like the content of the Reader's Digest HOW THE ____ WORKS series. Most of the activities aren't actually experiments, but some cross nicely with history, and the text itself (with accompanying illustrations) is mostly very clear explaining the various concepts it covers.
For textbooks, I really like Real Science-4-Kids. :-)
Traditional elementary-specific texts are painfully inferior, in my experience, and basically have repeating sections every year about the weather, the human body (sometimes), plants and animals, a touch of ecology, a bit about magnets and simple machines and VERY rudimentary physics, and that's really it. If your kids know about those few, small areas, in a traditional textbook sequence, that's all K-4 really is. 5th grade is often a sort of mini-overview of all the topics that will be covered in middle school science paired down into a single book, or sometimes there's a 5-6 sequence that does that.
If you want to see a typical sequence, click on the books on this page to get the table of contents and be prepared to be underwhelmed:
http://ww.mhschool.com/science/2005/student/index.html
If you want open-ended experiments, why not have your kids answer some of the questions they ask you about science-related stuff through experiments they devise themselves?