Embracing a Healthy Family: Christian Focus' Big Bible Science Book Review

Science and God go hand in hand and when one has the opportunity to teach in a homeschool environment, it’s an excellent opportunity to show children how much both are entwined. We had the opportunity to review Big Bible Science (RTM 5-7; RM 7-11) by Christian Focus. It’s a fun and comprehensive book full of experiments that allows parents/teachers to explore God’s world with their children/students. It’s a thorough book with a detailed table of contents, an introduction, how to make the most of each lesson, chapter components, safety, miscellaneous information, notebooking and of course, experiments.

Experiment sections are broken into various subjects such as Newton’s Law, plants, animals, solar, body systems and so forth. The variety is plentiful offering experiments that should interest and stir imaginations for ages 5-11. The description of ages and levels are explained in that "RTM 5-7" means “Read to Me,” and "RM 7-11" means “Read Myself.” The span of ages allows younger students to conduct and be a part of the experiments while the older students have the opportunity to expand their knowledge and thought processes by elaborating more. The units provide various levels of activities while reinforcing a Biblical viewpoint and creating an awareness about how science goes along with God.

GETTING STARTED

The way I tackled the units was first to acclimate myself to the Big Bible Science book and prepare by looking over the experiments and finding the ones that I thought would appeal most to my children. Each experiment has the following sections:

Objectives which provide essentially the learning goals.

The materials section provide the opportunity to prepare for each lesson ahead of time. Materials were chosen to minimize expense which is a nice feature of the curriculum.

The Big Idea provides a scientific explanation of the lesson.

Activities include a variety of activities that include games, demonstrations and experiments.

Apply It extends the lesson to have students apply it to things outside the book and experiments. It helps to reinforce Biblical and scientific aspects of what they learned.

Go Beyond is for older or more advanced students providing additional opportunities to expand the lesson.

One other item to note is the Miscellaneous section is geared towards the parent/teacher or the child/student and provides a break down of activities that can be done by a student alone, by a student with one or more partners, or only with a teacher. This provides more information to aid in planning ahead and with older students, the opportunity to instill responsibility by encouraging working without one-on-one parental help.

Another key aspect to Big Bible Science is notebooking. As the book notes, notebooking is an excellent opportunity to integrate math and literacy within each chapter. I love this idea and think it’s a great way to educate on more than just one topic. It makes sense to merge the opportunities for reinforcing skills such as writing experimental findings into a research type report and so forth. I also liked the suggestion to only write on the front pages and leave the back side for sketches , quick notes, photographs, etc.

We completed a few experiments from the book and and here are a couple of my children's favorites activities from Experiment 7: Acids and Bases.

The experiment starts out discussing foods, tastes and how God fits into everything including food. Explaining how even our tongues can detect the chemistry of food and furthering the children to prepare for a taste test and forming a hypothesis before actually tasting two sour acidic foods and two bitter bases.

The first part of the experiment was tasting lemons and here is the verdict:

Next we tried limes and that invoked the same response as the lemons. Here is a mixed reaction to cocoa powder:

Another part of Experiment 7 included different activities. For Activity 1, it was an integration of trying a new food without judging by appearance and utilizing Psalm 34:8. After creating our Green Eggs and sausage, I had no ham, we referred to the book to answer questions posed to the children about the appearance and taste of green eggs. It smoothly moved into questions about Jesus and referring us to sharing the word of Jesus by stating we need to be like Sam I am from Dr. Seuss and share the news about how tasty green eggs are.

Overall

We really enjoyed Big Bible Science (RTM 5-7; RM 7-11) by Christian Focus. It provided many options and experiments that were fun and challenging. It's a lot of material to read on each page but preparing ahead of time and planning each experiment will alleviate any apprehensions one might have. The flexibility is also golden so I can gear it towards my children's interests. My youngest proclaimed it's fun and can't wait to try more.