By Design, Christian Homeschool Science Curriculum

As I said earlier this month, I’ve got a goal of reviewing all of the homeschool curriculum I’ve ever used, and today I’m sharing a new homeschool science curriculum I found, By Design homeschool science curriculum.

{I received a free copy of By Design science curriculum, and was compensated for my time, all opinions are my own.}

What makes a good science curriculum?

Have you ever thought about that?  Is it the amount of facts stuffed into the book?  How many experiments there are?  Or what about presentation?

To my mind you need a combination of those things.  I’ve certainly read science books with too much information in there, or books with bad experiments I could never do, or the presentation was amazing, but the information was terrible.

I’ve found an inquiry based homeschool science curriculum, and it would be ideal for homeschool co-ops.

What does By Design homeschool science curriculum look like?

I’d have to say this is probably the most-integrated by grade level homeschool curriculum I’ve seen.  Each grade does the same unit at the same time, but each grade covers slightly different and as they get older more in-depth materials.  There are four units: human body, life science, earth and space science, and physical science.  Because I’d been right about to start into a human anatomy review the kids I skipped to that unit, and we especially had fun with a bacteria growth experiment (more on this later).

When you buy the curriculum you get a textbook, a teacher’s manual (and if you want a more structured curriculum then this is a great fit for you, because there is lots of detail in this teacher manual, oh and the manual is designed to be used for two grade levels, so you don’t have to buy it every year), and finally four workbooks (one for each unit).

The publisher, Kendall Hunt Publishing, also wrote several other really great looking curriculum.  She also provides faith-based programs in Reading Language Art called (Pathways) and a New Kindergarten program (Stepping Stones). In addition, Kendall Hunt offers Talented and Gifted programs in mathematics (M2 and M3) as well as products developed in collaboration with the CFGE (Center for Gifted Education) College of William and Mary in subject areas such as language arts, social studies, and science.

 

What I think is the best feature of By Design curriculum?

I can easily see this being adapted to homeschool co-ops.  Many of the science experiments and demonstrations are best done in a larger group.  I’ve looked at many homeschool science curriculum, and most are not designed with easy adaptation to co-ops.

 

Next feature, that’s great?  I can easily see this being used by all levels of homeschool moms, so often you run into a curriculum that just says, “Go for it, have fun,” when the mom is saying, “But I don’t know what to do.”  By Design gives you the level of hand-holding you want, it’s all in there, lesson plan suggestions, extra activities you can do (or ignore), and the textbook is very engaging.

Looking around the Kendall Hunt publishing site, they’ve got some truly impressive resources, I’m going to have fun poking around there to learn more (do you ever wish you had more hours in the day to explore fun sites?)

 

Growth of Bacteria experiment

While there’s a lot of great experiments in the By Design science curriculum, my kids’ favorite was completing the bacteria growth experiment.

Purpose: to see how rapidly bacteria can reproduce.

Supplies: rice (a LOT), cups, timer

Now as it says in the book, you are supposed to start with 1 cup of rice and every 15 minutes double the amount you have for 3 hours.  This is where all the cups come in, because you just put a new cup with the new amount of rice.

But, I thought that wouldn’t be super impressive, so I used overhead tiles.  Which worked great for the first two hours.

But at the end of two hours we had over 200 overhead tiles on my overhead projector.  Even using the hundreds tiles, I was out of space.  I mean, look at my kids covered in bacteria.  I mean these poor souls are probably covered in all sorts of sores, there’s so many bacteria on them.

Side note: The textbooks version works better for showing the progression, because you see each cup and the relative amounts, but there was something kind of fun about piling it all together.  My kids were certainly impressed.  But, to truly get the idea of this experiment, I didn’t get it done right, sadness, I learned too late their reasoning behind their set-up.

So, we had to rely on figuring it out with math, and boy did they have a lot of work figuring it out.  They had made rough estimates and predictions, which are the numbers you can see in the bottom corner of the overhead, but they’d gotten off slightly in their calculations, so actually charting it out in the workbook helped them correct their mistakes.

More Fun Experiments to try

• Botany picture books
• Hands-on Science Kits
• Mount Saint Helen
• Inside Out Books
• Art and Pretend Play in Science