Science in the Beginning by Dr. Jay L. Wile Review

Today my 12 year old son and I finished Science in the Beginning by Jay L. Wile published by Berean Builders. www.bereanbuilders.com

The curriculum was advertised for K to 6th and my son is 6th graders so my review will be based on being at the very high end of the age range.

We really enjoyed the curriculum and I would highly recommend it for families for kids probably 2nd grade and higher but if you have younger ones as well listening is is great! The book is broken up into 90 different lessons with some that are considered challenge lessons only for older students.

Every lesson contains an experiment. I believe that the experiments are very well thought out and demonstrate the concepts being taught very well. Generally they use household items. There is a list in the book so you can be prepared for each week. We chose to do 2-3 lessons in a setting and worked on science twice a week and we finished at the beginning of February after a little bit of a rocky start in the fall. (Initially my son wanted to do this on his own, but he changed his mind.)

Every lesson has questions for students to complete in their science notebooks as well. There are three levels of questions for each lessons. Oldest students generally do the "older students" questions as well as an additional question that is applying the concept outside of the exact text of the lesson. There are simple questions for the younger students.

We really enjoyed learning about the amazing creation that God created in 6 days and all of the details that are in our wonderful creation!

A supplemental book, Helps & Hints for Science in the Beginning is available with answers to questions. This book also contains tests. The tests were not my favorite. They cover 7 lessons not including the optional lessons. We probably should have broken our schedule down more by the testing schedule and it may have worked better. I thought the tests asked some very basic questions and then some really specific questions. I don't keep grades for my son so it wasn't that big of a deal but generally he did not ace the tests with no review. A review of the lessons before the test would been a good move on my part, but we didn't do that.

Summary - I would highly recommend this science curriculum. For 6th grade, I don't think it's enough for an entire year. If we would have started this when my students were younger, I can see spending an entire year or more in one of the three books of the series and then cycling through them again when they are older.

We will start Science in the Ancient World  next week.