Homeschool Curriculum Review: BookShark Science Level 3

hi I'm Candace and you're watching homeschool on the hill and this video is a homeschool curriculum review on book shark science level three now book shark actually gave us all of the materials that you're going to see in this video today in exchange for my honest review you might remember a little while back I did a video and it was called how we use a book shark science level 3 in our home school and I will link that video at the end of this video in that video I just showed you what it looked like to do a lesson with book shark science I just kind of give you a peek into the program but now I'm going to show you all of the materials that are included in the level 3 science program and after I show you the materials I'm going to address some of the questions that you guys left below that last video and I'm also just going to let you know a little bit about the cost and what we thought of the program first let's take a look at the book shark instructors guide for science level 3 and you can tell the focus of this particular level is biology taxonomy and human anatomy and guys I've shared in other videos about book shark products that I really really love the instructors guide I know you can use it however you want but we pretty much follow it now I'm not going to go into great detail here because I do have another video where I talked a little bit about the book shark how we use book shark level 3 in our home school and so I won't just go on and on here I pop this out of the three-ring binder so that I could move the pages around and show you but simply put book shark is a four-day program leaving that fifth day open for whatever you want to do a lot of you know that we have a fun Friday on the fifth day where we kind of do some extra stuff in our homeschool but the instructors guide is just really clear on which book you'll be reading on which day how many pages and then which of the student activity questions your child will need to answer also has some optional activities for week 15 here you'll see an optional activity to make a hummingbird feeder on on day one of that week and on day four something about silk now there's notes that go with all of this to kind of give you a further explanation so right here where it talks about silk it's talking about taking some time to explore how silkworms work and then this is a really cool and feature it says to check out the instructor guide links on the web page for sites that you can learn more about silkworm processing and so they do have some recommended sites that will help you find an appropriate video for your child and I think that's really cool now the answer key for the student activities pages is right here with each week's lessons and you just find them on the back of the lesson plan and sometimes it's on the next page as well you can see for week 15 there was quite a bit here and they're just available in condensed forms just makes it really easy you don't have to find a separate answer key it's just kind of in order as you are working through your weeks quickly we can take a look at the activity sheets these are included in your book shark level-3 package you can get one copy of these included and then you can pay i think it's 13 99 for extra sets so if you're using this with more than one child just know that that is available and so you can see here just a basic black and white some of our holes have torn i need to put the little stickers on them to repair them but we just kept these sheets in a three-ring binder I know some people might want to just kind of give out what they need each day but I like to keep everything in a binder and so like right here from our first lesson it shows which book we read and which section of that book and I'm sure we answered questions one into that particular day I'm not looking at the instructors guide for sure but that would be about all some days took a little bit longer than others and I'm going to go ahead and answer a question right here that I was asked under the how we use this particular curriculum video and that was how long did the lessons take so usually the reading portion takes about ten or fifteen minutes I do that with my son and then it usually takes them about ten or fifteen minutes to do this work independently later in the day so now for the books I think I'm starting with our favorite book first this was one of the four books not the first but one of the first books we read this school year and we loved it it's an us-born book mysteries and marvels of nature most amazing photos in here and illustrations and usually a lesson would involve reading either two pages or four pages now we jumped around in the book but that's because book Shrek had everything organized so that we were actually staying on the same content it was just located in different areas of the book and so it's so useful that they've gone through and they've planned all of that out here's another born book that's included in the level three science program and it is first encyclopedia of the Seas and oceans now there aren't as many photographs in here so you do have a lot more illustrations and there are some photographs in here but just not as many it's still a wonderful book we enjoyed our time in here not as much as the other but I mean we still looked forward to our time in this book I'm trying to give you an idea of what some of the pictures look like all right the next book is from real science for kids it is biology level one we actually started the year with this book which you might have noticed in the instructors guide that I showed you earlier I wanted to show you here the table of contents and the different chapters living creatures cells the building blocks of life photosynthesis did you hear me get tongue-tied photosynthesis parts of a plant how a plant grows protest one protest to the butterfly life cycle the frog life cycle and our balanced world so this book I have to say really impressed me the level of the vocabulary that was being introduced to my eight and then turn nine year old during the school year I was just really impressed by there's a really simplistic way that they organized all of the information so it's not overwhelming you do take it in bite-sized pieces my son really did not struggle with this but I was impressed because I just felt like we were talking about some things and that I thought were a little bit advanced for a third grader but the way this breaks it down it made it very very easy to tackle so I never felt overwhelmed by it even though um I don't know I just thought it was a little bit more it was more than I expected but I was just very pleasantly surprised here's a small book I shared this in one of our what we're reading videos I think I think that's what I shared in um and it's called listening to crickets it's a story about Rachel Carson and it's written by Candice F ransom and this book right here I was very excited about this particular book Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and she was educating people about the dangers of pesticides and my oldest son was actually taking entomology this year and so he was actually able to team up with his youngest brother and read this book with him because it was a little above his reading level if I was going to have my youngest son read this independently so I was going to need to read it to him and it just made sense to have my oldest son hang out with him and read this book since my son was already learning about pesticides and had already learned a little bit about Rachel Carson and then he just learned more through this biography about her life another book included with the program is this Magic School Bus book inside the human body and most of you are probably familiar with Magic School Bus so you know how colorful the pages are going to be and this book only took us I don't remember just a few days to read there's actually a lot of information packed into this book and my husband actually worked through this with my youngest son and because he was off at work but I love Miss Frizzle I love the Magic School Bus so I'm really glad they included this because it's an educational read but it's fun and I'm glad that book Shrek included this in the program so next up is the us-born science encyclopedia and this book is so full of material it is just chalked full and I will tell you the instructors guide made mention that this whole book is not to be read during this program and they let you know what to focus on but it really did get to the point with this particular book because there was just so much information all over usually we handled about two pages per day that we would often start looking at the questions so I could figure out where did I need to kind of zero in because sometimes this book was a little bit overwhelming and I think that's why book sharp made that note in the instructors guide to let you know you don't have to bounce around and read everything and so we started looking at the questions first to just see mainly what we needed to focus on but it's a wonderful material I'm glad that we will have this on our bookshelf because we can pull it back out but I do think the way Book shark schedules it is perfect because honestly you don't really need to take this book in large chunks bite-sized pieces is about all we could handle next I'm going to show you these tops books together and we have book 38 and 39 and 38 focuses on radishes and 39 corn and beans and I'm actually going to move this one out of the way for just a minute and show you this is actually the one that we started right before we took Christmas break you can just write directly in these little workbooks if you want and we did start our radishes now when we did these books well we actually just did this one and I'll explain that in just a minute and there is a DVD that can walk you through how to set up all of the experiments and then this program includes the kit that you will need full of the materials things like on some plastic cups and the little soil pellets is that what you call them soil pellets different seeds tape foil some little cups here and a lot of this stuff there's some more seeds down there is a lot of this stuff if they asked you to pull that out and you didn't have it on hand you would get very frustrated so almost everything you need for the science experiments that it's included in this box so let me just share my experience with you quickly on why I still have all of this we did not get to this book now that doesn't mean we didn't do any science it's actually their science scheduled and this is scheduled at the same time so we had other reading material and activity questions but this was scheduled as well we actually have saved this particular book for the summer because I thought we would pay better attention to it we've got some lazy days coming up and and I know what happened with us with this particular book is that we started it right before Christmas break which almost sounds like okay well you would be on break we neglected this and did not complete this project and I'm really ashamed to share that with you guys but it's the truth even though we messed up at trying to work on this throughout a break I still have decided to save this until this summer because I just feel like it won't be long before I hear on board and I thought why not you know put some energy into this so we have the materials and I just thought it would be really wise to do it this summer and I'll let you guys know in one of my updates if I actually was able to achieve it okay well now you've seen all of the materials that are included with book short science level three and now I just want to address some of the questions that you guys asked when I posted the how we use and book shark science level three video so one of the first questions I was asked was can you purchase the instructors guide separately and then just acquire the books maybe at your library or however you want to you can purchase this instructors guide separately it is $44.99 on the book shark website I also received a question asking his book sharks secular yes book shock refers to itself is secular and I've also noticed they refer to a lot of their programs and they use the wording faith neutral I was asked why did I choose book shark over sunlight shared that my husband and I don't share the same faith so it's really important for us to try to find materials and we are seeking those out more and more now that our religiously neutral and if they do have religious references I'm trying to keep them as minimal as possible I was also asked about the differences between book shark and sunlight but I'm really going to leave that up to you guys because I think it would be easier for you instead of me trying to think of all of the levels and then to misspeak to just kind of pull up book sharks website and pull up sunlights website and you can kind of compare the levels obviously you're going to see some faith-based materials included with sunlight and you're not going to see those in book shark I think sunlight offers a five day or four day option for their programs where this book shark does just for day programs but you're going to notice a lot of similarities but I'll just kind of leave that up to you to look at the difference in materials and see what you think I had a couple questions about does book shark teach evolution and I can tell you after using book shark science level three I don't think we came across the word evolution even once like nothing stands out at all I can't speak for all of the levels so I can't tell you yes or no there's going to be a lesson on evolution and if that's something that really bothers you and I maybe would consider giving a book shark a call their representatives are so helpful and maybe they can kind of help you understand what it is they teach at the different levels now one of the things I like about book shark is that book shark isn't divided by grades I've had some other people ask that about book shark it's divided into levels and as you saw with this level three the suggested age range right here is ages eight to 11 so that can cover multiple children and honestly I think that you could use this with a child that's maybe a year or two younger I'm not sure I would go all the way up to eleven I guess it would just depend on your child and their abilities um but anyway my son did not struggle with this he's eight years old he turned nine during the school year that we did this and he didn't struggle at all so I think it's a pretty good range but honestly different reading abilities it really it might be 11 or it might be even 12 just depending on your child I think you can actually look at some of the samples on the book shark website and decide if a level is appropriate for your child or children that's one of the things I really like about book shark is that you could combine multiple children so nobody asked me about cost but I know you guys want to know where the instructors died and the activity pages and the science kit and the DVD and the books all of it together I saw on the book shark website today was 202 dollars now I don't want to go without mentioning that I have promotional codes that were given to me by book shark for $15 off a $150 purchase so if you are interested in ordering this science level 3 or any of the book shark programs and you want to get a discount code all you have to do is email me at home school on the hill at gmail.com and I will respond to you with a unique code it can only be used once and it expires August 31st of 2017 I also want to make sure you know that book shark sells a variety of materials on their website but the discount code is only good for book shark materials I really want to say thank you to book shark for allowing me to use these materials with my son in our home school this school year and I will go ahead and just share with you guys because they've given me these materials in exchange for my honest opinion and I will tell you right now we loved this program I even said it in an earlier video had a lot of fun with this program this is my favorite and I used two different Sciences and this one was my favorite and honestly I really fallen in love with book shark I have another review to do on their history program and I'll try to get that up later this week but for us having a faith neutral option especially for history and for science has really been a perfect fit for our family and this has been a wonderful experience this school year so that's it for this video and if you have any questions that I didn't address in the video please make sure you comment below remember to email me if you are looking to get a promo code before you order book sharp materials for your family guys I thank you so much for watching and I'll see you later bye you

Channel: Homeschool on the Hill

Views: 5,101

Rating: 4.8947368 out of 5

Keywords: bookshark, bookshark homeschool, bookshark curriculum, homeschool, homeschool curriculum, bookshark review, bookshark science, curriculum review, homeschool review, homeschooling, homeschool science, science curriculum, science, homeschool science curriculum, science review, science materials, homeschool materials, homeschool books, curriculum

Id: ygDNL7daPrQ

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2017