Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in
exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I
compensated in any other way.

 

 

Experience Biology

Homeschool Review Crew

Journey Homeschool Academy

 

Recently as part of the Homeschool Review Crew, my oldest daughter got to try out a new online science program for studying science, Experience Biology.  Experience Biology: Upper Level is through Journey Homeschool Academy and is a high school level biology course.  This course is a video-based course taught by Luke and Trisha Gilkerson.  But what really drew us into wanting to try this course was that it is Bible or Christian based.  

About the Program

Journey Homeschool Academy offers Christian based studies in the sciences to homeschool families.  Right now they have a few different levels of astronomy and biology.  The biology is offered in both elementary and upper level as well as in an equipped upper level. 

 

 

We received the Upper Level Biology course to review with a start date of June 15th.  The program is a college prep course with labs and really requires the student to study and engage.  The course is 35 weeks long and you get a years to access to the course once your start date arrives.  So for our purposes, the course started June 15 and will end on June 15 next year but the actual work is only 35 weeks so there are extra weeks to make up or take a break for vacation. 

The course is taught in four ways.  There are videos to watch, quizzes to take, lab assignments for hands-on and watching, plus weekly reading assignments.  This is a full credit for biology science for high school.

 

 

Let’s talk textbooks. 

We all know that science courses include big thick and heavy textbooks right?  At least that was my public school experience and even my college-level courses as well.  But for this course, you don’t have that.  You can purchase a textbook to go with your course but you are also given a PDF file of the textbook, student lab guide, and the student guidebook.  These can then be printed out or used online.  My daughter and I are both people who like to have the book in hand to highlight or flip through so we decided to print off the books.  These were then placed in 3 ring binders.  

 

 

There is no teacher textbook.  Because really there is no teaching involved from me.  I just check in every once in a while to see where she’s at and also she comes to me if she has questions.  This is our first time working on 

Our Thoughts 

I liked that this is a course that I do not have to teach. In high school and college, I did really well in the sciences.  In fact, I’m a nurse so I had to take a lot of science courses.  But teaching it isn’t exactly my speciality.  Performing experiments isn’t something that I normally do and that is why this course looked like an ideal help for us.  My daughter took a biology lab class at our last semester of homeschool coop and thankfully they had finished all of their dissections before the virus hit and we had to stop going. 

 

 

Okay, so there are some labs you have to do.  Which means you have to buy supplies.  But there is a syllabus at the beginning that lets you know the what and when so you can plan.  Due to shipping issues, we did have to wait a few time to do labs.  This did affect how quickly we could do the course because you do have to finish one lesson before you can move onto the next one.  

I would say the hardest thing for us was the labs.  Going forward I will be setting up a lab space in our garage so that they can be done while someone else watches the other children so it’s not so hard to focus on what is happening.  I felt that a lot of what was missed was just because of the busyness going on around in the background. 

This is a very thorough biology course.  I learned a few things looking over the material with my daughter that I don’t remember reading and learning about in my own college-level courses.  This is a course I can recommend and I think that we will be using this for other children in the future.  

Learn More

You can learn more about Experience Biology: Upper Level and Journey Homeschool Academy by visiting the Main Blog Post on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.  Here you will find all of the reviewer blogs linked up indicating which course they reviewed.  For reading more reviews of the upper level biology level please look for the keyword UpperBio in the link description. 

Journey Homeschool Academy can also be found on social media on Facebook and Instagram.