Physics

	Highland Dove Homeschool

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Physics

To teach Physics to my 2nd & 4th grader, I bought Real Science 4 Kids from Gravitas Publications. I LOVED the text. I used the teacher's manual & lab book for kindling. (well I threatened to and I might just yet.) You have to add ALOT to make it a full year (10 lessons). But the text REALLY broke down the concepts well so even the 2nd graders got it. The book is full of cartoons that make the kids laugh (isn't that what cartoons are supposed to do?) and there are a few (6-10) key words in each chapter for the kids to define.

The publisher's website is http://gravitaspublications.com

We did a chapter a month (the chapters are very short), defined the terms, looked up the concept in the Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia and found our own experiments mainly using the Usborne Big Book of Science Experiments & the PBS show Zoom website.

As far as the Teacher's Manual & Lab sheets : The expiraments didn't work for us from the TM and the kids & I could never figure out what the lab book was asking for without looking at the TM and even then it wasn't clear. We chose to ditch the TM (with all the exp.) and the lab books., use TWTM lab write-up form and find exp. from
Usborne exp. books. Things went much smoother after we made that decision. RS4K seems a little pricey for such a small book - but we really liked it (the textbook part).

It went very well. To motivate myself (did you read my science secret?) I organized a Science Co-op. Wellllll, I asked one other family if they'd like to join us once a month for science. It worked like a dream. The moms would trade off, so I only had to get together one science experiment a month!! And...I was actually getting science done since there was some accountability (but she was soooo sweet and understanding when I'd have to cancel & reschedule).