Science & Social Studies

[Mama~Love]

What are some good secular science & SS programs? Seems like there's tons of reading, math, & writing, but what about the others?

[OTMomma]

There are also lots of options for those- check out www.rainbowresource.com many many choices.

Instead of doing S.S. we are doing history, and have been using the Story of the World program. Apparently its Christian approved, but its never been an issue to me, I'm not overtly pagan though, so no clue if that would make a difference. The Ancient history part, does have some Bible references in it, but in a historical way.

Our science program has been a hodge podge of doing units on a specific topic that interested us- so I'm not much help there. But I do know there are many many programs.

[zjande]

Ok so I'm neither athiest or humanist, but this site has come in handy for me:
http://www.hsfreethinkers.com/curricula/general

You can use the "curricula" tab up top & choose each subject you'd like to look at. I might question their opinions slightly though because they list Story of the World as Christian & I've certainly never noticed that at all. (I've not used sotw vol. 1 though...).

Anyway, HTH.

[CariOfOz]

VERY helpful site Zjande! Thanks for sharing

[lach]

What ages are you looking for?

For science, I've heard amazing things about Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. It's supposed to be pretty intensive, but really really good. It's designed for kindergarten through grade two, but I have to say that I learned things paging through it.

For slightly older kids, the major secular science curricula are: R.E.A.L. Science (not to be confused with Real Science 4 Kids, which presents creationism as fact) for elementary, and the Classic Science series which is better for middle school. There used to be a series called Science Logic, but the link is broken and in googling I can't find it again. You might have better luck. Here is a link to it being referenced.

History and social studies is harder. Story of the World is very popular, and we'll probably end up using it, but the book about ancient history does present Biblical stories as fact. I'm not okay with that. Lots of secular homeschoolers work around that, and I probably will too, but forewarned is forearmed. The makers of the R.E.A.L. Science books mentioned above have a history series, but I've literally never heard anything about them, either good or bad.

I definitely want my kids to have a very firm grasp of geography, but I haven't really done much research into what's out there. Unfortunately, the US isn't really big into teaching geography. Steck Vaugn has a workbook about maps, I think. There are various stand-alone books that teach different geography skills. I might end up ordering some textbooks from the UK, where it's a stand-alone subject even in the early grades.

For the cultural studies aspects of social studies, I'll probably just use a bunch of books about kids and holidays around the world.

[zjande]

Originally Posted by CariOfOz

VERY helpful site Zjande! Thanks for sharing

The credit goes to an mdc member, I wish I could remember who, that shared the link with me right here in our homeschooling form some months back.

[Mama~Love]

My HS kids are 8 & 6. Thank you for all of the ideas - there's more out there than I thought.

[MissRubyandKen]

Pandia Press makes R.E.A.L. Science and History Odyssey. I have HO Ancients Level 1 to use for next year. Its a guide to use one of the popular History spines, at level 1 either Story of the World or Usborne's Internet Linked World History, or both. Then it has lists of related books and sometimes movies, some mapwork, and some activities. It uses History Pockets and activity books. The really nice thing is that it is all laid out for you. The coinciding page numbers, order, etc. I really need that for this year. It does not go into PreHistory at all, so you would have to cover that yourself. And if you wanted to use SOTW you'd probably want to discuss the Bible aspects in some way.

I was considering Pandia Press R.E.A.L. Science as well, but honestly the price tag dissuaded me. I worried I would buy it and not care for it. They do have good sized samples on their website so you might want to check that out.

Another Science option is My Pals Are Here Science by Singapore. If you go to the Singapore Math website on the left hand side you'll see a link for Science and you can find it from there. There are some samples and you can see the table of contents. It depends on what you want from a Science curriculum, but this is what I wanted for this year. I've been given a free curriculum that I like though, so as much as I want to I won't be buying it. It is low text, high interest with lots of colorful pictures. It looks deceptively simple, but this is what I think Science should be like at this level, grades 1-6 would do well with this curriculum I think. I'd recommend still supplementing with reading library books, nature walks, nature journal, or whatever if you already do those things for Science. If you order just the textbooks and activity books for one year through Rainbow Resource I'm pretty sure it would be somewhere between $17-21, depending on which books you chose. That would be for three textbooks and three activity books.

Mosiac, Bringing Up Learners website, has a free History curriculum, but I really haven't checked it out in depth. I know they have a link for one with PreHistory and one without, so the one with should be secular.

[PGTlatte]

There is another program I think is secular:

http://elementalscience.com/

I have not looked at the materials though.

The Singapore Math website also has some science stuff. I have not looked at it or read any reviews of it (LOL - just saw the previous post !)

[dotnetdiva]

For science, I think I purchased all the secular science programs to check them out. R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey, BFSU, Elemental Science and Singapore Science My Pals are Here. Elemental Science is simply way too simple for us, all it basically does is list a few pages in a book to read, but it was inexpensive so at least I didn't waste too much money. It did encourage us to read one of the books we had laying around though. What I'm going to do is follow the framework of BFSU (Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding) and then use the worksheets of R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey and the little "textbook" of Singapore to give it some more color and hands-on. BFSU by itself is quite intimidating to use, so I started making a document that will help me prepare for the lessons.

For history, again, I purchased all the secular materials. I started with Myths, Maps, and Marvels (it is free) as it was the only program that really covered prehistory. I ended up blazing our own quite thorough prehistory program, covering from the Big Bang to formation of stars/Sun/earth to Precambrian to Cambrian and all the way through. We had a blast!

Now that we started actual history, we used Story of the World. At first I was going to just skip the few Bible chapters, but as we progressed, I realized I do want my daughter to be familiar with these stories. I made sure that my daughter knew that these were just stories, that some people believed in. It isn't hard to apply a scientific eye to most of this and come up with fact verses stories. We also covered other creation myths from other cultures and thoroughly went over the Egyptian myths and such. Out of all of these history programs, I fell in love with the easy SOTW program, with the text, an awesome Activity Guide, and the handy audio CDs. Please don't let the "Christian slant" daunt you, I of all people who want everything 110% secular almost let it and that would have been a shame. But if you do, History Odyssey is a great program too! We're taking parts we like out of it. I just can't seem to find the time to do the History Pockets they use.

For Geography, we're just using simple colorful workbooks that seem to be doing an okay job. We started with a Rand McNally Beginner Geography and Map Activities and now we're using Scholastic Success Grade 1-2. As usual, I'm curious about other programs, so we also use Maps, Globes and Graphs. We really take advantage of the mapwork in SOTW, History Odyssey, and MapTrek as we study those areas. We also love Geopuzzles, we did Africa/Middle East last night in fact. Then there's Google Earth, globes, maps, even our bathroom shower curtain, lol. But I'm still looking for the perfect elementary (and secular) geography program... But until then, I'm satisfied with what we're doing.

I haven't figured out a good Social Studies program either, other than buying tons of separate books on this.

Use Rainbow Resource with your own common sense, as it will warn you against buying curriculum mentioning evolution, and it praises curriculum that gives a Christian world view. I still use them to order things now and then, but I know to watch out for their bias.

Love the secular hs freethinkers link, I use it a lot. I have mentioned it here in the past.

Ooh, I forgot to say that I always very thoroughly document our experiences with curriculum with photos and explanations, pictures of how it works. I try to do this as much as I can to help others. Click my profile, you will find a blog link there. I've ordered the blog with categories/menus/tags so you can easily find what you're looking for. For example, SOTW history is found using:
http://satorismiles.com/tag/sotw/

[MissRubyandKen]

dotnetdiva-

Would you mind sharing a bit about Nebel's book? I just purchased it used and am waiting for it to arrive. Are there specific experiments with how to or is it more a framework to follow? TIA!

[Mama~Love]

dotnetdiva - awesome post, thank you so much!

[dotnetdiva]

I don't have Nebel's book in front of me at the moment, but I'll just give a quick response. You'll do some pre-reading before the lesson. I think you might want to preread a bunch of lessons when you get the book, and then be sure to read it again before you cover the lesson. He talks over the lesson in detail, telling you how to teach it and what questions to expect. He'll describe a few experiments you can do. He has a listing of read-aloud books to get from the library that cover the topic. Once you're familiar with the lesson, you gather the materials to demonstrate the lesson and then go ahead and teach! He'll suggest you make a very simple notebook covering each lesson.

It can be a science curriculum all by itself easily. But some people might want/need some extra help. It definitely isn't an open-and-go program like some out there. That's why I might be using the worksheets from another program.

[lach]

Dotnetdiva, since you're obviously the resident expert here on Nebel, would you mind answering one of my questions? The organization seems odd. There's the kind of complicated flow chart of what needs to be done before what and what follows what, but it just left me kind of confused. I wish he had given a specific order to go in. Did you find that it really mattered which order you went in?

[dotnetdiva]

Well, that's the beauty of his book - learning the basics and then building upon the framework. So in this book, the order does matter.

I don't consider myself an expert, we've only done a few lessons, but feel free to use my lesson schedule:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dt2p5k7_41f48jm7fq

I hope to work on this document more... Have to run now!

[TEAK's Mom]

My 8 year old dd1 loves Joy Hakim's Story of Science books. They really put scientific developments into historical context with beautiful pictures and diagrams. Honestly, I enjoy reading them when she gives me a chance.

[lach]

Originally Posted by dotnetdiva

Well, that's the beauty of his book - learning the basics and then building upon the framework. So in this book, the order does matter.

I don't consider myself an expert, we've only done a few lessons, but feel free to use my lesson schedule:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dt2p5k7_41f48jm7fq

I hope to work on this document more... Have to run now!

Thank you for posting that! I think I am definitely overthinking this, but I like clear directions

Originally Posted by TEAK's Mom

My 8 year old dd1 loves Joy Hakim's Story of Science books. They really put scientific developments into historical context with beautiful pictures and diagrams. Honestly, I enjoy reading them when she gives me a chance.

I love her Story of US books, and have had great success using them with past students. I think they're great for upper elementary students. I haven't had a chance to read the science ones yet, but I was so excited when she wrote them. I was bummed that the Amazon reviews seemed mixed (not that I've read them in a while, so they may have evened out) but then it seemed like a lot of the negative ones were really concentrating on how there wasn't enough God creating the world in 7 days in them. Which is not a problem for me! It's really good to hear a good review on here.