Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Earth Science: Starting Over

Global Connections
If you have followed my posts, you know that I piece together my own science curriculum following the Well Trained Mind outline. I was a classroom teacher and have loads of resources and ideas plus I have just not found the spine that speaks to me... until now. While reading through my Blogline feeds the other day, Crunchy Mama from Diosa Dotada Endeavor casually mentioned Mr. Q's Classic Chemistry. Mr. Q? I've never heard of Mr. Q. So a Google we must go. WOW ! Mr. Q is a mild- mannered middleschool science teacher who has written e-textbooks for the 6-12 year set. Each book includes 36 weeks of lessons broken down into 3 days. Day 1- Reading, Vocabulary & Worksheets, Days 2 & 3 EXPERIMENTS!! He will GIVE you the Life Science Book to review, while the other titles (Earth Science, Chemistry, Physics) are $50. I have to say the price tag for PDF made me stop a day and think but I decided it was well worth it. For one, I was having a diffucult time finding the resources at the library that make this topic flow the way I wish. Two, I want to make sure we incorporate lost of hands on activities, something I have not been good at. Mr. Q gives me both! As I mentioned, the texts are written for G's age and each week includes 2 days of experiements. Also the e-books are not skimpy, the Parent Guide for Earth Science is over 400 pages and the Student Text is over 300!!

Having only done two sections so far in my own lessons I don't feel like we will be losing any time. I will post our volcanoes from last week next. Thanks Crunchy Mama for directing me to a new source and thanks Mr. Q for writing your books!

3 comments:

Leah said...

I am SO very grateful to you for posting about Mr. Q!! I am been looking for a science curriculum and nothing has really jumped out at me until now! Thank you SO very much!! And better yet, we are doing year 1 so the life science is just what I was looking for!! Thank you again so much for the amazing link! I can't wait to get started this week!

Teacher of One said...

Yeah! I am so glad it was useful for you.

Miss Jesi said...

I am considering using this program for my soon to be 7 yo dd next year and as you said the pricetag for a pdf is holding me back. I know it is an amazing amount of material but when you add printing costs on to it...eeek! So can you tell me, do you still like it? did it get done all year? how were the experiments? Thanks so musch for posting about this & I would love any review you can offer!