This year our oldest son, Joshua, started 1st grade. And with this milestone we would be using our first real curriculum. Like pretty much all homeschooling mama’s out there I spent hours researching… looking for the PERFECT curriculum! I picked the curriculum I wanted to use for Math, Reading, Spelling and Writing fairly quickly. It was with Science and History that everything got a little more complicated…

Joshua loves to read. He gravitates towards educational books and encyclopedias that have massive amounts of information. Not only that, but he wants to read and absorb ALL of it. He loves National Geographic! When I started looking for a science curriculum, I quickly got frustrated with the lack of depth in all the 1st grade options I found. Everything seemed to barely touch on each topic. Each lesson seemed to be no more than a page or two at most with maybe a paragraph each.

There were a few curriculum’s that poped up that were topic related rather then grade specific. These however seemed to be on the opposite end of the spectrum with way too much information for a 1st grader. One of these curriculum’s was Apologia. The more I looked into Apologia, the more I was certain it was the curriculum I eventually wanted to move to. I say eventually because due to other reviews I found from homeschooling moms addressing Apologia for 1st grade, I was convinced that it would be too advanced to start with. I didn’t want to overwhelm him!

Ultimately I decided on Abeka Science year one and year two… I chose to purchase both levels because I expected him to want to move at a faster pace then they suggest. Once we received the curriculum in the mail I realized; alone, it still would not be enough to keep his interest. I spent HOURS coming up with lap-book activities and a few hundred dollars purchasing extra readers and books that would supplement each section from the curriculum.

Even after all this extra money and time, Science was a struggle for us. The biggest problem for me was that it took a lot of preparation for each lesson. If I was not prepared for the lesson, I found I would just skip it…  Needless to say, we skipped A LOT of lessons.

After 6 weeks of “sticking with it” and getting further and further behind, I was done!! I decided enough was enough and I ordered Apologia’s Astronomy Textbook, Junior Note-Booking Journal and Science Kit from www.rainbowresource.com. I justified this purchase by telling myself if it was too much for Joshua we could either move at a much slower pace or we could just put it on the back burner until he started 2nd or 3rd grade. Either way the money was not wasted.

I am SOOOO thankful that we switched!! I LOVE that everything is all in one place for the most part. All I have to do is grab the textbook and read. If there is an activity that I want Joshua to do in the Junior Notebooking Journal then I place those pages in Joshua’s student notebook along with the rest of his work for the week. When we have an experiment it is EXTREMELY easy since the materials are all nicely packaged together and ready to get started!

I wish I had listened to my instincts and just started with Apologia!! It would have saved a lot of frustration on my mine and Joshua’s part… Not to mention it would have saved us a lot of money!!

SOOO… if you have a student like mine who LOVES to read! And naturally gravitates towards educational books that are text heavy. Do NOT be scared away from trying Apologia Science for your 1st grader! Every student is different, don’t make the same mistake I did and forget to take into consideration your students natural tendencies. It will save you a lot of frustration this upcoming school year!

Hopefully this review has been helpful for you! If you are interested in a look into the physical curriculum or how the Science Kit materials are packaged checkout my video review!