Recently a friend asked me what science we used.  I eagerly whipped out Apologia and told her, "I have used this and left it, but I always come back."  Usually it is the lure of some other great way to do science that has caused me to abandon what I know to be an excellent curriculum. 

However, textbooks aren't everyone's cup of tea.  They can be boring after all.  The lures that have drawn me away are those that offer lapbooking, literature based, or the other assorted varieties that offer a different hands on approach.  

Lapbooking isn't going to make a lot of sense to a person who has never seen it done.  That was the experience I had when I purchased a science curriculum that was all about lapbooking.  Reading about it in the catalog sounded great!  In person though, I thought the whole thing was hokey and so did my children.  Never having actually heard of lapbooking, let alone seen a completed one I didn't understand how my children were actually getting anything out of it.  They felt like they were just cutting and pasting someone else's data.

Just the literature approach didn't give my children a hands on experience.  I had to find the right science experiments to go with the books we were reading.  I wasn't about to let my children play with uranium or create their own while studying Madame Curie.  What else did this woman study anyway?  Most biographies only talk about her one great discovery.

I've learned though that I can have all of that with Apologia!  Just look at the following (minus the uranium):

You can buy the lesson plans or get them for free depending on what is available.  The LBC Guide to Astronomy is my favorite lesson plan because it tells you great books to read to go with it.  Unfortunately, it is the only guide they have to go with any of the Apologia textbooks.  I'm hoping that they will have such a great success with the Astronomy guide they will work on the others.

Lynn Ericson sells her lesson plans for Apologia textbooks through Rainbow Resource and a variety of other sources.  These are basic and just take you through the textbook with no extras.

If you want a kit that goes with each book, (all the items you'll need for each experiment) you can find those at Creation Sensation.

Donna Young has lesson plans for only a few of the books (Upper grades) but they are FREE.  She also offers a few worksheets to go with them.

Jeannie Fulbright, the author of the elementary books, has free notebooking pages and scheduling resources.

The lapbooks to go with, Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, can be found at The Schoohouse Store.  I think a few other places are selling them as well.  Shipping is FREE from the Schoohouse Store though, no matter how small your order.  If you click on the Schoohouse Store icon in the sidebar of my blog and buy anything, then I get a percentage of the sale.  Nice huh?

I understand that the lapbooks for the other books are being created.  I sure hope so!

If you get the LBC Guide you can get an idea of how to break up the other elementary Apologia science texts and then go to this website for Living Science Books.  It has a great list of titles that go with all kinds of science studies.  You might find other/different books as well at Readable Science.

All of the above should fill anyone's homeschooling type be it classical, Charlotte Mason, and even just plain textbook style.