Early Elementary Science Education

The book itself is exactly what I had hoped; however, it was shoved in an envelope and shipped through the mail and arrived damaged - usable but damaged. As I needed it right away, I have no time to return, but I can't say I'm not very disappointed.

I am totally loving this abridged guide to Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. BFSU is the science curriculum we are using as secular homeschoolers and it is in-depth! While on one hand this is a reason I love this program, on another it does make for a lot more work to sort through it all. Cue Shannon Jordan's abridged guide here. She has really made this program very accessible by helping to sort out the most integral parts of the curriculum. I personally read through Nebel's book on my own time (and keep it near by), but when I am going over the lesson with kids, I focus on the abridged guide. For our own ease, I have been utilizing Google Classroom to post activities, videos, etc.. by topic in a class so I can plan ahead and have it ready to go a few weeks ahead of time. It is definitely worth the cost of an additional book to assure our success in the program, glad I went for it!

I own the original volume of Building Foundations of Scientific Understand volume 1. I bought it a few years back and found it overwhelming and confusing. I was super excited when I found out that someone was going to write an abridged edition of the BFSU and hoped that it would pull it all together for me. I'm not disappointed. I'm more of a liberal arts type of person; I love history and literature and even some math but I'm not interested in the inter-workings of science. All that being said, I LOVE this book. Don't miss understand, it's still a lot but this book makes BFSU vol 1 much more doable and I'm actually looking forward to the upcoming year.

Offers good breadth of instruction of the various areas of science. Contains excellent recommendations for activities to solidify the concepts, along with links to useful books and an online support page. We're really enjoying this curriculum during pandemic homeschooling.

I love the idea of the original science curriculum, but was not going to use it as I couldn’t figure out a sequence for the lessons. Not only does this book recommend a sequence in six terms, it also has a great concise materials list and teaching script for every lesson! I’m happy my kids won’t miss out on a fantastic early science education.

The content of this book is fantastic, but she has pages suggested to print and you CANNOT print pages from a kindle book. I'm going to have to pay for the printed version to make photocopies.

This book has been a wonderful companion to the Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding. It takes a good bit of the prep work out of it for me, and arranges the lessons in an easy to follow order.

This book is a perfect companion to Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. It gives you a two year lesson plan, materials lists, and then gives you a simple-to-follow guide for teaching each lesson. These are the notes you would write to prep each lesson of BFSU already done for you!I would not recommend owning this book as a standalone. You do not get the rich insights BFSU gives in each lesson, and that is not the purpose of this book. But for anyone who has used BFSU in their homeschool (or classroom), you know the considerable time that goes into prepping each lesson due to the way BFSU is organized. Well, this book does much of that prep for you and gives you notes to work directly from when you are teaching.I love that this lays out a two year lesson plan. I had to change parts of it around due to starting at a different point in the year and it was still very simple to do that with the way this book is organized.I hope this author sees that there is a need for a similar resource for volume 2 and will write a companion for that book as well!! I deeply appreciate this resource and hope that everyone using BFSU picks this one up. It is worth it!!

We are using this as an “open and go” science curriculum. It makes it so easy !I can explain a science concept in only 10 minutes and then we read books or watch videos on that concept - for a better understanding and seeing what it looks like in real life.