For a beautiful age appropriate, but in-depth introduction to the study of botany, I would highly recommend Exploring Creation with Botany. It fits easily with almost any elementary level homeschool curriculum or teaching style, and it is particularly well suited for a classical or Charlotte Mason approach that uses note-booking. I have not seen any early elementary science I liked better than the Apologia science Young Explorers series.
It is easy to teach from, since the questions and assignments are right there in the same book (with answers in the back). There is a supply list to make it easy to plan ahead, and most of the items are normal household items, easy to find. The lessons can be read aloud to the child, or he can read them to himself.
The eight year old in my family loves her botany lessons and so far has studied the structure of seeds with sunflower seeds and beans (examples of monocot and dicot seeds, respectively) and she is growing sweet potato vines in a jar in the corner of the kitchen, watching with fascination as they have progressed day by day from tiny buds to purplish shoots that gradually unfurled bright green leaves and now are beginning to lengthen into vines.
With this homeschool curriculum from Apologia science, I love the way the textbook makes lively connections and comparisons with all kinds of other things she’s experienced, like comparing a seed coat to her own rain coat. This not only helps her understand the material it develops her curiosity about all kinds of knowledge. This homeschool curriculum models for her a process of thinking, of making connections between different kinds of things in order to understand better. Apologia science brings botany right to a child’s level, but the conversational descriptions and delightful creativity of the examples makes it interesting for me, too. Some of the connections are ones I would not have thought of, but they are very interesting and true.
Thanks to Apologia science, I think she’s getting far more out of this homeschool curriculum for botany than she would from typical science textbooks for her age, which would have had perhaps a chapter on plants, another chapter on animals, perhaps another one on electricity or magnetism, with lots of words to memorize, and fill-in-the-blank quizzes. That’s how my textbook was in third grade, and I don’t remember very much of it now. But I do remember the experiments we did, and the classroom pets.
The Apologia science botany program has experiments and activities for every lesson, with plenty of narration and note-booking. Most kids seem to remember hands on activities better than they remember just words on a page, so this is providing a great foundation for her that should really last. The immersion approach of this homeschool curriculum lets the student to feel they are an “expert” in a particular field as they learn more and more about one thing over time. This builds confidence and a sense of ownership in what they learn.
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Copyright Learningthings.com. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in any online website as long as you include a link to http://learningthings.com and give full attribution to Learningthings.com as the source.
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