Welcome to another blog entry by St. Irene Press, author of A Study Guide and Workbook to A Child's History of the World by Virgil M. Hillyer.
Today, I wanted to share a review of the Masterbooks science curriculum: Elementary Science of Soil, Sea and Sky. The current price for this curriculum is $61.57 and it is geared towards children in 4th through 6th grade. If I was going to give this curriculum a rating, I would give it 3 out of 5 stars and below I will explain why.
First of all, I do not regret purchasing this curriculum and I am glad we did it! Would I have used something else given my experience? Perhaps. I will go into more below. First of all, as we have found with several Masterbooks curriculums the "estimated time" required to complete assignments is way beyond what it actually takes. For the first two books in the curriculum, Big Book of Earth & Sky and Bugs, my son was able to complete his entire science curriculum for the week once a week in about 20 minutes. So if you are looking for a "robust" curriculum, this is definitely NOT it. Big Book of Earth & Sky is somewhat of a strange "book" because it is not really a book at all, but a large fold-out poster. For a good part of the year, your child is just "reading" one panel in this book and doing a worksheet. So very light! Perhaps too light! The Bugs book is great, but I do feel that it is below level and more suitable for 2nd or 3rd grade. There is just not enough in-depth content to consider this upper elementary science. However, there is a very, very big shift when the Ecology book comes up. All of a sudden the required reading goes from very brief to a substantial chapter (if reading for all age levels) and the worksheets go from a page of mostly fill-in-the-blanks to a page or more of definitions! It is very bizarre to be honest to go from one extreme to the other. It seems as though the first two books and worksheets are made for one age group, and the Ecology book for an entire different group (though still perfectly age appropriate for 4th-6th grade). Oddly enough, the worksheets were not always relevant to the content, but literally required the student to write definitions from the glossary. I found this disappointing because this does not actually check for comprehension of the material or encourage the child to really "learn." After a few days of this, we threw out the related worksheets and I switched to a "note-booking" style. I asked my son to write down fun and interesting facts from each chapter and that worked way better! It worked so well in fact, that he asked to keep doing that for his science for the rest of the school year (it was so light, we finished early). I will note that my son really enjoys learning about science and it somewhat of a speed reader, so this is a very "easy" task for him. We have the entire "Wonders of Creation" series by Masterbooks and plan to do this more "free-form" science for a while: he reads a chapter, writes down interesting facts, and draws a picture.
So that is why I give the curriculum 3 out of 5 stars. I did want a light science this year (just not that light) and my son did enjoy it and learned a lot. I just felt that the first two books were too easy and light and that the last one had worksheets that were not age appropriate or well-thought out. Sorry if that sounds harsh - just giving an honest review! The books themselves are great (with regards to all of the science included, the last two chapters of the Ecology books weren't really science so we skipped them), so I would definitely give the included books 5 out of 5 stars!
Next year, we are planning to start the God's Design series and uses that through 8th grade. I have looked through that curriculum and I'm sure as many fans of Master Books science already know, it is very well-thought out, consistently good throughout, and has been around for a while. I was on the fence about this curriculum and then watched a Master Books employee interview the author and thought this would be a great fit for us. (Update: This curriculum ended up not working for us, which is in a later post.)
There is a lot of curriculum out there to choose from and I hope that someone finds this review helpful!