Apologia Astronomy {TOS Crew Review}

Apologia Astronomy

TOS Crew Review

I love astronomy and have wanted to share it with my children.  A favorite curriculum of ours is Apologia.  Recently, Apologia Educational Ministries offered up their Exploring Creation with Astronomy, 2nd Edition for Crew review.  I applied as soon as I saw Apologia astronomy!  It sounded wonderful and fit right in with our science topic of the year which is astronomy!

Apologia astronomy arrived at our door and the whole house started shouting with joy!  The box included a student text, notebooking journal, jr. notebooking journal, and an audio cd.

 

 

The notebooking journal is geared towards grades 3/4 and older.  I put my oldest age 11 and fifth grade in this book.  It fit her well and she was able to understand and answer the questions it posed.  She didn’t like the spaces for answering questions though as they were too small.  Her handwriting is still a bit big and took up more space than was allowed.  To help with this I had her write her answers in a notebook for the long questions.

The Jr. Notebooking Journal is geared for Kindergarten through grades 2/3.  For this one I decided to use my 10 year old daughter was is right around this grade level.  For reading purposes she’s a solid third grade but for writing she leans closer to a second grade level so it was a good fit for her.  She did some complaining about writing but overall did really well with the journal and enjoyed the subject matter.

How We Use It 

Because I was already planning on all the kids using a different science curriculum that was going to focus on astronomy for part of the year I knew that I was going to want them all to listen to the textbook reading.  So, instead of having the girls each read the sections by themselves I read them aloud to the whole family.  We’d chat about what we read and then the two girls would do their journal assignments.

We’re following the schedule laid out by Apologia so this astronomy course will last us the full year.  The activities are done by all of us which makes for lots of fun times.  Those students not doing the journal pages think it’s fun that they don’t have to do all the writing but I’m impressed by the increased comprehension that the girls doing the journal pages are having.

The audio CD contains the full text.  This is like listening to someone read you the textbook.  We did not use this function as the CD player in our van is not working currently so we didn’t have a way to listen to it while driving.  While we could have listened to it at home I enjoyed reading the book to my children so we did that instead.

Want to learn more about Apologia astronomy?  Check out what other crew members thought of their review products on the Main TOS blog.  You can also find Apologia astronomy on facebook, twitter, pinterest, and instagram.