In connection with the previous post entitled, “Science is Important”, I thought I’d jot down our family’s “top favourites” for science for the grades 4/5 – 12 levels since I do get asked this from time to time.
Personally for my own family, I do incorporate a lot of things that I’ve either developed or organized from “wherever” including my own life as a student years ago. I have not yet published science curriculum for these junior/upper grades and for some of these topics, I have no future plans to do so.
Full Disclosure: We used to sell some of the Pearson Education titles mentioned below however, only have 2 items leftover from that series and all of their titles listed below are NOT in stock and we cannot get any more of them. The titles below all represent either books that we do no longer sell OR they represent curriculum which we have never carried in our product-line. We like these personally as a family.
Pearson Education Prentice Hall Science Explorer Series (e.g. Earth’s Waters) – There are life science titles, earth science titles, and physical science titles (which includes chemistry). They are full-colour, thin hard-cover, straight-forward, pleasant layout/font/graphics, comprehensive textbooks. The majority of the lessons in most textbooks of this series are presented very well for grades 4 (advanced) to grade 10 levels. You might have a challenge finding these but they might be offered as “used” somewhere.
Ellen McHenry’s Basement Workshop: Ellen McHenry develops curriculum differently than some homeschool publishers and we like how that is. See her website for titles. We began with her Botany curriculum and also printed out her chemistry books (the general one and the one for carbon chemistry). She has printable e-books for some curriculum.
Science Shepherd has a senior high school level Biology textbook, DVD, and lab course (with all labs on DVD if you can’t do them in real life). It is very comprehensive but presented very well. It has a solid science foundation with a lot of great details and comes from a creationist perspective. If a “conversational style” for curriculum bothers you this might be the answer. (Conversational style is where there are paragraphs upon paragraphs telling you sort of a story to get to the main points. We didn’t want that style ourselves so that is why we searched for something that would be a better fit for us.)
We tried a semester of Homeschool Astronomy and it was also enjoyed and presented well.
I really liked what a couple of Cindy West’s resources looked like to supplement some science for our family. She is a homeschooling mom who also develops curriculum, such as for creative nature walks.
Perhaps these links will help you find something good for you.
