Homeschool Science Program

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Hi all! 👋 I am finding our science program just not working for us. I currently have Harcourt for my 5th grader, but I am thinking of switching to Apologia. My hesitation with Apologia are reviews pointing out the anti-Catholic bias of the author (specifically Galileo.) If any of you use this program, would you be willing to give me your opinion? If you use another science program, would you recommend it and please explain why?

Thanks much! I am sure wishing I went to the home school fair this year, but I arrogantly thought I had everything covered! 😊
 
I used Apologia.

But I used it at the high school level. And I have been known not to worry about a page or two that I don’t like. But I don’t remember any problems at the high school level. I did like the fact that the book was written to the student. Everything was straightforward, no “you have to read this section two weeks before you do the chapter because you need this obscure item.”

I think back in 5th grade we used Behold and See, from Catholic Heritage. Sorry, I don’t what we thought of it. It was just too long ago.
 
MomaMary8 said:
Hi all! 👋 I am finding our science program just not working for us. I currently have Harcourt for my 5th grader, but I am thinking of switching to Apologia. My hesitation with Apologia are reviews pointing out the anti-Catholic bias of the author (specifically Galileo.) If any of you use this program, would you be willing to give me your opinion? If you use another science program, would you recommend it and please explain why?

Thanks much! I am sure wishing I went to the home school fair this year, but I arrogantly thought I had everything covered! 😊
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When I home-schooled last year we used Apologia for the curriculum. On the contrary I did not notice it being very anti-Catholic at all. The author seemed to be much fairer in the textbook towards Catholics than most other evangelical authors.
 
MomaMary8 said:
Hi all! 👋 I am finding our science program just not working for us. I currently have Harcourt for my 5th grader, but I am thinking of switching to Apologia. My hesitation with Apologia are reviews pointing out the anti-Catholic bias of the author (specifically Galileo.) If any of you use this program, would you be willing to give me your opinion? If you use another science program, would you recommend it and please explain why?

Thanks much! I am sure wishing I went to the home school fair this year, but I arrogantly thought I had everything covered! 😊
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I learned from the Seton homeschool program and I think its science section is fantastic. It focuses on the contributions of Catholic scientists to each field, and it’s experimental projects and descriptions are so fascinating that I still refer to it years later.
 
Forgive me for not really being up on this, and I’m genuinely just curious about it – but, what makes a science curriculum anti-Catholic?
 
ellen42 said:
Forgive me for not really being up on this, and I’m genuinely just curious about it – but, what makes a science curriculum anti-Catholic?
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I don’t know anything about the Apologia series specifically, but some Christian science texts will have a lot of references to how evil the Catholic Church is and how She is anti-science, or will use the fact that the Catholic Church accepts the possibility of a God-directed evolutionary theory as proof that Catholics aren’t Christians because the Bible describes a seven-day creation, that sort of thing. Such books are usually written for evangelical or fundamentalist Protestants.
 
thank you everyone! I will look into the other programs that were mentioned, as well as Apologia. It seems not too many have issues with it, so I will include that in the mix as I decide.

@ UbiCaritas. thank you for responding to the question. I, too, do not know if Apologia contains any anti-Catholic teachings, but that was the reason for this post. Anti-Catholic sentiments are alive and well in many books, and we always have to be ready to defend our Beloved Church. I just don’t want to have to do it while teaching my kids science 😉
 
MomaMary8 said:
@ UbiCaritas. thank you for responding to the question. I, too, do not know if Apologia contains any anti-Catholic teachings, but that was the reason for this post. Anti-Catholic sentiments are alive and well in many books, and we always have to be ready to defend our Beloved Church. I just don’t want to have to do it while teaching my kids science 😉
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Oh, believe me, I do understand. I was homeschooled in high school, and went for a year to a homeschool co-op to which Catholic kids were technically permitted, but there was a fair amount of subtle harassment along these lines in classes, assemblies and the like. Texts like these were not at all uncommon. While I was never inclined to leave my faith over this sort of thing, it got extremely tiresome having to deal with it in classes ranging from science to Latin. Sometimes you just want to focus on the topic at hand, y’know?
 
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