My World Science

During a recent attack of curiculitis, I ordered My World Science, specifically the Weather/Astronomy/Oceans and Coral Reefs unit.

The unit, student pages, and all the required texts (which I ordered from Powell's) arrived last week.

The verdict so far: just OK.

Part of my unhappiness is the spine books, the 'one small square' series. They are exactly the type of book which drives me mad because of how disorganized the information is. It is why I hated Usborne History. There is a main text but then there is tons of information scattered all over the page, in various fonts, superimposed on illustrations etc. It's all very messy to me. I can never figure out what order I'm supposed to be reading it out loud to the kids. To me it's hectic and scattered, and precisely what classical education is not supposed to be.

We have tons of supplementary texts, because I have done all these subjects already when A was younger. To me, supplementary means extra, enrichment, when you have time, when you were organized enough to make all your dinners for a whole week, if the kids think this is the most fascinating thing in the world. The key being, that they're optional.

But in this program, supplementary texts are really not optional.

There is a mismatch between the level of the 'one small square' books and the student workpages. These little books are very basic and the student workpages are quite a bit harder. They ask for information which was either not explained, or very briefly explained in the text. One lesson was looking for a definition of the word 'nebula'. I looked back and the word 'nebula' had only been mentioned once during the assigned reading for that lesson and had not been defined.

I wanted this primarily for my 7 yo and this is billed as a grammar level program; one of the signs of the grammar level is the 'poll parrot'. They retain & spit out information presented to them. What the kids are constantly saying during our lessons is: 'they didn't say anything about that in the text'. Making connections, extrapolating, digging further - those are logic stage skills; my daughter would be fine attacking it from that perspective. But then, the primary text is waay too basic for logic school kids. Both the kids are doing the program but it's not really right for either of them.

We also found an error in one of the lessons; an entire crossword puzzle was not laid out properly. None of the clues matched. I e-mailed the author & she sent me a replacement that same day. Points for good customer service. But it shouldn't have happened in the first place.....

I'll let you know how it goes. We've only done 3 lessons. We started with the Astronomy unit because it still gets dark at a reasonable time. Later in the summer, seeing stars means staying up most of the night. Then we'll do the weather and oceans. I thought we'd be done in about 6 weeks but it might be a bit more.