EC Physical Science, 4th ed, Notebook

The Exploring Creation with Physical Science, 4th Edition Student Notebook helps students learn the art of taking effective notes so they can better understand and retain what they are reading. Through the use of various note-taking prompts and questions, students discover how to identify the important information discussed in the textbook. The Student Notebook also serves as a place for students to record their answers to review and study guide questions and log data and observations while conducting experiments and other hands-on activities. Having all completed notes, lab reports, and study guides in one place helps students stay organized so they can more easily review what they have learned and study for tests.

Build Writing Skills

While using the Student Notebook, students will build their writing skills by learning to do the following:

• Identify and outline the main concepts of a passage
• Use the author’s style to guide their note taking
• Compare and contrast terms and concepts using graphic organizers
• Classify items referenced in the text
• Summarize concepts in their own words to help them better understand what they’re reading
• Record the definitions of key terms, building their scientific vocabulary

Improve Note-Taking Skills

We encourage students to evaluate their note-taking efforts after each test. Did their notes help prepare them for the test? If so, they are capturing important information. If not, they’ll need to add more details to their notes. But don’t worry—throughout the notebook, we provide students with plenty of tips to help them evaluate and refine their note-taking skills and discover the techniques that work best for them.

Apologia encourages parents to review their student’s notebook to make sure the student is properly engaged. Suggested answers to the note-taking pages are provided in the Course Guide & Answer Key (sold separately). However, student notes should never be graded because there is no single, correct way to take notes. By the time students finish this course, they’ll have learned a wide variety of strategies for capturing new information and transforming it into knowledge.

What’s Included?

The Student Notebook includes the following:

• A suggested daily schedule
• A breakdown of daily assignments detailing exactly what needs to be done each day
• Note-taking pages that include prompts to help teach students how to identify and record important information from the text
• Space to answer review and study guide questions that are listed in each module
• Space for students to record their results from hands-on activities
• A lab section that contains all of the experiments, with space to record data, results, and conclusions
• Lab report templates
• Creation Connection pages, where students can record their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reactions to what they are learning

Open-and-Go Daily Schedule

This course is designed to be done 4 days a week. A suggested daily schedule is included in the Student Notebook so students can easily understand what is expected of them each day.

This course contains 15 modules, and each module generally takes 2 weeks to complete. A typical week requires studying science for about 1 hour a day for 4 days. During this time, students will read the textbook assignments, conduct experiments and other hands-on activities, and answer review questions to check their comprehension.

Assessment and Grading

A study guide at the end of each module helps students review what they have learned before taking the test. Answers to the study guide and test questions can be found in the Course Guide & Answer Key (sold separately).