Crew Review: Apologia “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Vendor Name:  Apologia

Vendor Contact:  Apologia contact page

Name of Product:   I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist book and curriculum/workbook

Price:  $16.00 for the book; $33.00 for the workbook

Age/Grade Range: high school to adult

This is probably the first review for the Schoolhouse Review Crew that I am unsure as how to write it.  I wish I could just say this book is great and tell you  to go buy it – but I can’t.  This book is deep – I haven’t actually finished it because it’s deep and it does take some thought to read this, so it’s not a book you can leisurely read in bed before falling to sleep – unless you want to re-read everything in the morning!

Written by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek this book aims to give Believers the knowledge to defend their faith, like Jesus did, with humbleness and love.  The book is written for the high school or adult who wants to know more about the whys and how to defend their faith with knowledge and is written in an engaging style that while deep, also keeps ones attention as they read it.  With chapters such as: ‘In the Beginning There Was a Great Surge’, ‘Miracles: Signs of God or Gullibility’, ‘Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead’, and more this book will give us a reason for our faith.

In a world filled with anti-Christian rhetoric such as there are no moral absolutes, evolution, and evil this book belongs in the hand of every Believer.  Even though I’m not done reading it yet, I have not found anything that goes contrary to the Bible – which is more important than any doctrine espoused by a church.  Weighing this book against the Bible and it stacks up with what some Christians still believe today – God created the Earth and everything in it in 6 days and rested on the 7th, Jesus did rise from the dead, miracles were performed and witnessed, and more.

There are times I have found myself confronted with non Believer’s who try to tell me that the Bible is full of lies or how can I know that it’s true since it’s contradicts itself and would a loving God send thousands of people to Hell?  Usually I have no come back – I know what I believe but non Believers don’t want opinions based on the Bible, they want scientific, hard facts that can be proven and I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist will equip me for that.

If you or your high school student, like me, worries that they can’t possibly remember everything in the book, then the workbook may just be what you need to go along.  You don’t have to be a high school student to work through this book either – it’s meaty enough for an adult who wants to know the reason we have for our hope.  I am so glad they have a how to use this book to begin with – if I was handing this to my high school student (when I have one) they’d be able to read through it and work through this without much oversight from me, except to discuss questions and answers and grade tests.

It is recommended to take two to three weeks to read each chapter in the book and complete the assignments in the workbook.  Sounds like a long time and when one thinks it’ll take at least nine months to complete the workbook – it is but it’s time well spent since you’ll be able to accurately talk to persons who are hesitant to believe in what you’re saying about your faith.  The workbook is designed to make it easy to understand and remember what it is that you read in the book and it’s divided into sections such as:

• Hook:  this will help you remember what the chapter discussed and some questions to get you “warmed up”
• Book:  delve deeper into the specifics covered in the chapter
• Look:  suggested activities to help you discover the truth for yourself.
• Took:  a summary and a help to apply what you’ve learned to your life

Throughout the workbook are also short biographies of those who were either Christian or non Believers – these are inspiring in the fact that we can see how those who stood for Christ defended their faith and how those non Believers lived a life contrary to God and His Word.  As you work your way through the book there will be tests that can be accessed for free on the Apologia website as well as the answers to the questions.  This will be a long nine month journey but if you or your child comes out stronger in the faith then it’s been well worth it and one day you’ll hear, “well done”.

**Disclaimer:  As a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I received this product, at no cost to me, in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are mine.

 

Crew Review: Apologia Who Is My Neighbor

Vendor Name:  Apologia

Vendor Contact:  Apologia Contact Page

Name of Product:  Who Is My Neighbor

Price:  Text: $39.00  Notebooking Journal: $24.00  Coloring book: $8.00

Age/Grade Range:  ages 6 to 14 years

Are you wanting to teach your children a Biblical world view?  Then welcome to the the third in Apologia’s series, What We Believe titled Who Is My Neighbor?  this one picks up where volume two left off and I have been blessed to receive and review this volume as well.  This volumes deals with servanthood and how to be the light and the flavoring to the world.  Lessons will cover:

1. Does anyone really need me?
2. How can I make a difference?
3. Who is my neighbor?
4. Why did God make families?
5. What can I do for my country?
6. Why can’t we all just get along?
7. Who is God’s family?
8. Why does the church need me?

Following along the lines of the other books there are the big idea, short story, words that need to be remembered, memory verses and more but in this volume is something new and that’s the encounters with Jesus section.  I really liked this section as it tied up the whole lesson and related it directly back to Jesus by re-telling a story about a person who had first hand knowledge of Christ while He was on earth.  As is often the case in a re-telling some characters who aren’t named in the Bible are given names that correspond to that culture or there may be a character added to make the story flow more smoothly for the children – the authors neither take away or add to the story.

It is recommended that this book be covered twice a week with each lesson taking place over a period of three weeks.  This was actually quite doable for us as a family having a varying degree of ages and abilities.  I liked not having so much to do on each day and this schedule also allowed for make-up time if something had to be skipped or moved to another day.  Some of the readings are quite long so I recommend if you have a strong reader or two that they be allowed to help in reading aloud to those younger siblings – or you’ll likely to get very parched or have someone lose interest very fast.

The accompanying notebooking journal is full colored, beautiful and hopefully will be a keepsake of all that your child learned about servant hood and what they desire to do for the Lord.  There are a lot of spaces for note taking and the only thing that makes me not want to let my children use the note taking pages is that they are so pretty!  Scripture pages will allow the student to write down the memory verse in their chosen version of the Bible, facilitating their memory work.  Word searches, cross word puzzles and mini books all make for a fun learning experience while also providing a way to really ensure understanding and retention of the materials.

Do you have younger children?  Maybe ones who can’t write yet but still need to be included, well then the coloring book is what they’ll need.  Full pages with some text from the book will have the child engaged as you or their sibling do the reading for the day.  Of course these aren’t just for younger students, older students who enjoy coloring would also benefit from them and help to reiterate certain points.  My only idea that would make the coloring book even better would be to have somewhere, like the back cover, a list of what coloring pages go with which lesson and/or pages in the text.

If you are wanting a worldview curricula that suits the whole family then Apologia’s Who Is My Neighbor fits the bill.  As always it can be tweaked to fit your family’s ages and ability levels in regards to what needs read and according to your schedule.  If you’d like to see what others are saying about Who Is My Neighbor please visit the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog.

**Disclaimer:  As a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I received this product, at no cost to me, in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are mine.

 

Botany Preservation experiment

I’ve done the borax preservation method for flowers and it turned out good – I used it to preserve flowers from my Grandpa’s funeral – however I couldn’t get all the borax powder out so I just decided to toss them.  However they did keep their shapes and their color.

This was one of the experiments for our Apologia botany study.

Aren’t the purty??

Well fast forward way past the recommended two weeks…….okay I got lazy, the girls would remind me, then I’d forget and with being so tired and other things going on we finally opened them about 4 weeks after we first put them in.

Beginning to uncover them:

Fully uncovered and out of the box:

As you can see they didn’t stay together well and lost almost all their color.  So if you do this experiment I suggest you don’t leave or forget them.  We ended up having to toss the flowers as they were just so brittle and too much of the powder was retained.  The children enjoyed seeing the effect though that the borax drew out the fluids and dried the flowers out.

Radomness – again.

In our Botany studies some experiments we haven’t been able to do with weather shifts.  One was pollinating flowers, so we’ll come back to those we aren’t able to do until spring.  The children are eagerly awaiting our flower preservation though, which we’ll open when school commences this week.

In Sparkies at Awana, Christian and Bethanne made pumpkin laterns.  They used a paper lunch bag, cut out pumpkins and those fake tea light candles.  Very cute and I’m thinking you should be able to figure out which is Bethanne’s and which is Christian’s.

I’m learning that my children have many talents, not the least of them is Christian can finagle a sucker given to his sister at the bank and can simultaneously suck on both at the same time.

For Mystery of History we made scrolls with Hebrew words translated into English words.  Each child made one.  I tea dyed the paper to make it look old.  Note:  glue doesn’t like to stick on tea dyed paper that has oils in it.

So there are some random pictures from the last couple of weeks – I’ll soon be posting about our field trip to the organic Bison farm and a Christian ministry Ranch.

Science experiment

We were supposed to be sprouting seeds for an experiment for our Botany studies.  One went in the fridge, one in the window and one in a dark closet – so this is what we did:

 

So the point was to measure each day to see how big the sprouts get, well when we checked them yesterday which would have been day 7 or 8, I lost track, the one in the window started to mold – the seed was soft but no sprout.  The other two got soft but again no sprouts.  I know that there were seeds found in King Tut’s tomb that grew after 2,000 years but I’m guessing since seeds today are treated for a use by date, our seeds just weren’t up for the job.

I told my three very disappointed children we’ll buy some new seeds and retry the experiment.  Of course the fact that we had several cloudy days and no sun was getting to the window may have played a part as well?

Learning…………….

Wow!  Two days before September and into our 5th week of school!  Can I just say how wonderful it’s been this year to be so on track.  I  don’t know if it’s because Christian is older and can do more things with us or just that I’m feeling more in control of school this year.  Whatever it is I’m grateful for it and can only pray we continue moving on at this pace.

The children are enjoying Mystery of History Vol. I again and even Christian participates some.  We are 3 lessons into our Apologia Botany, and we’re waiting for the junior notebooking journal to be released so I can get Christian caught up.  I was going to add in Bethanne’s Latin, all 3’s Spanish and art this week but we’re taking a trip to see a Cleopatra exhibit and a historical re-enactment education day this week so I’ll be adding those subjects in next week.

We studied the ancient Olympics and the children made crowns for the winners – Bethanne made hers to fit her Webkinz lion, Tracy.  These are just bay leaves glued/taped onto pipe cleaner but they had fun.

One of the science experiments was to make our own leaf chromatography – using leaves, alcohol and coffee filters.  It didn’t work.  We’ll retry the experiment on Wednesday maybe using markers if we have to otherwise we’ll do the leaf skeleton and see if we can make that work.

Rubbing the leaf’s green onto the filter:

The strips of filter hanging in the jar w/alcohol:

Now today the children had to build a wall like that of Nineveh (think Jonah) and had to make it wide enough for three small cars to fit side by side, and the towers had to be more than twice the size of the wall.  The cars represented chariots.  This of course was for our MOH study today.

We moved on to seeds today and we had to soak bean seeds so we could open them up.  All three children really enjoyed this project and it was interesting to learn how God made embryos both in human form as well as plant form.

I’m so blessed to be able to home educate my children.  It’s a learning experience for me as well as I’m learning things that I wasn’t taught in school – I’m so glad to be able to teach these things to my children and see them grow in the Lord.

Transpiration experiment – Apologia Botany

As promised – we finished our transpiration experiment yesterday!  Go figure, th plant actually had to be in the sun to do it’s work.  I’m learning so much along with the children – like for instance: I had no idea that plants (leaves) have ‘mouths’ they are called stomata.  These mouths take in the carbon dioxide we exhale and give off the oxygen so needed by us!  That is where the transpiration comes in to play – when the plants have too much water and need to let it out.

Placing a baggy over the plant at it’s petiole and securing it and then watering the plant will result in noticeable transpiration.  Think of a rain forest.

Here are the pictures of our experiment.  The children had the most fun putting their hands inside the bag to test that it really was wet!

The pictures before transpiration began:

The after: I hope you can see the condensation in the baggy:

So that is transpiration.  We had fun with this experiment.  I’m so glad that their is a quality science curriculum that keeps God at it’s core.

One Month of school!

Well we’re half way through our 4th week of school, it doesn’t seem like we’ve done a month of school but we have!  We’ve stayed relatively on track minus some Botany experiments that we have to go back and record our findings for, but otherwise we are on track.  The girls are both on their 13th lesson of math and Christian is almost done with his K/1st workbook so we’ll be deciding if we need to order the 1st grade Rod and Staff workbooks for him soon.

Botany is proving to be fun but also time consuming, unlike Astronomy, with Botany we are having to go out and find leaves or plants – it’s a bit more hands-on.  I love having the notebooking journals to go along with it, much easier than printing off a lapbook.  It was a bit more of an investment but it was well worth it and I can’t wait for the junior journal so I can get that for Christian and we can back track through it for him.  I’ll take some pictures of the girls’ work later.

So one day we had to go to a local forest to discover some other plants since we don’t have a lot of different flora in our yard.  It was a beautiful and for August, quite cool.  I got turned around and we ended up at the Raptor center so I let the children look around at the center and enjoy the birds.

We got to see a bald eagle!

Then there were some owls and Kestrels.  All the residents of the Raptor Center were injured to the point where being returned to the wild is not an option, like the eagle had to have one wing amputated.

After that we finally found where I needed to be and the intent of the hike was to find different types of plants like angiosperms and gymnospheres, vascular and non-vascular plants.  The girls will draw them in their journals according to the types.  Here are two of the four we needed:

In history we studied the American Indians known as the “Mound-Builders” which is quite awesome since we live in a state where these Native Indians once abounded.  In fact I am going to take the children to one of the sites next month, when it cools off again.  One of the activities was to design their own mounds out of play dough and so here are their mounds:

Christian:

Hannah:

Bethanne:

 

 

We’ve got a transpiration experiment going on right now so once that concludes we’ll post pictures of that along with their lovely light hut (I keep forgetting to get a light bulb!)

 

Science Experiments

We’ve been working hard on finishing up our Apologia Astronomy study and so with that comes a couple experiments which were both fun and educational.  My children have enjoyed our study with Apologia and we are all looking forward to moving on to Botany for the 2011-2012 school year.  We now have only 2 lessons left in Astronomy so in two weeks we’ll bid a farewell to our first completed science curriculum, both exciting and bittersweet.

Here we are making clouds.  Using boiling water, a match and a baggie filled with ice we made clouds to demonstrate how clouds are formed as well as what they look like up close.

Then we set off our rocket.  This was just a film canister filled half way with water and a denture cleanser tablet inside.  It didn’t go as far off the ground as the children would have liked, so we troubleshooted and have some ideas for another launch.  The children want it to go up in the sky, we’ll see!

Erupting Olympus Mons

As promised here are the pictures from our exploding Olympus Mons!!!  It was warm (around 71 degrees) and fairly dry out so we were able to go out and make our volcano erupt.  The green dye was not in honor of Saint Patrick’s day that was already decided before today’s eruption.

And now for the video!

You can click on this link for Photobucket which will allow you to view the eruption.

If anyone can tell me how to upload (I get error messages from both YouTube and Photobucket with my movies from the iPod) and how to embed them that would be much appreciated.