Building Blocks of Science 3

My Son likes the illustrations and colorful presentation. The reading stimulate questions and conversations and the experiments are always fun and engaging.

Fun way to learn and remember basics of science. The experiments are fun for all.

This is such an amazing program! Colorful, fun, and hands on! LOVE it!

So my oldest loves science, and experiments. So he was eager to start with this fun looking bundle! I was a little intimidated at first, it being 3 books and a separate email with a pdf file to download, and me not being sciency at all... But scanning through the first 2 lessons, I am confident I can do this! We tackled the first 2 lessons, my sons actually learned some science, and we got to do experiments (thank you for those labkits!!). Happy mom, super happy kids... Look forward to going through these books the coming year!

When my third grader received this as part of his curriculum kit, provided by a charter, he was really excited! He was quickly drawn in by the colorful comic like illustrations in the textbook and the experiments were intriguing at first glance. As I parent I appreciated that the teacher's manual was a separate book and that I could reference different sections without flipping through my student's workbook to find the answers, which is the case with many workbooks available. I also liked the way the book was divided into different subsections of chemistry, biology, physics, geology and astronomy to provide a survey of the different areas of science. It seemed like the Building Blocks of Science Book 3 curriculum would be a lot of fun.

We started the year with gusto, but that quickly changed to disenchantment. There were several reasons this didn't work well for us. First, some of the experiments didn't work well. A few that come to mind were the chromatography portion of experiment # 3 (Make It Un-mix) - you were supposed to be able to tell what color of food coloring each cup had by using the step by step process indicated by the experiment. We completed it as instructed, but the results were really lack luster and thus left us very disappointed early on in this year's science journey. Another experiment that sticks out is experiment # 20 (How Do Galaxies Get Their Shape) - we had a difficult time getting the iron filings to make swirling patterns in the corn syrup which were intended to represent how galaxies get their shape. There were a couple others that we had trouble with which unfortunately squelched our excitement and made it increasingly difficult to lug out our science materials.

Another criticism we have of this curriculum is that some of the experiments are VERY similar or overlap so much that it feels like you are doing the same experiment over and over. We found ourselves wishing that they had just combined the experiments and made part I and part II. For example, Experiment # 10 - (Lemon Energy) and Experiment # 12 (Moving Electrons) could easily have been made into one experiment because for experiment # 12 you begin by building the lemon battery built in experiment # 10. We also found that Experiment # 16 (Moving Iron) and Experiment # 20 (How Do Galaxies Get Their Shape) were so similar in set up and execution that our student lost interest.

Finally, and perhaps most critically, we had trouble tying it all together and forming concrete conclusions. The comic like illustrations that seemed like an asset in the beginning turned out to lack substance. Using at least a few real photographs would have helped our student to visualize some of the concepts being taught. Although the textbook does provide an excellent bullet point summary at the end of each chapter, the experiments didn't always reinforce these points. It doesn't seem that my student learned much by completing this science curriculum, but even more troubling was his increasing lack of motivation to complete lessons in a subject that generally is very intriguing to him. He was often overwhelmed by the amount of writing and space to draw pictures in the Laboratory Notebook (workbook) and had trouble relating it back to the readings in the text.

Overall, some families might be inspired by the open endedness of this curriculum, but for us this was overwhelming, confusing and just not a great fit. We'll be trying something different in the coming school year.