Does anyone have suggestions for a good science curriculum? I've been looking into BJU's science programs - has anyone used that?
One thing I found, though, is for the lower grades, like 1-3, is that just getting books out of the library on different science topics is usually just as good as what you'd get if you spent a lot on official curriculum.
The following is strictly my opinion based on our experience teaching our kids, but at those grade levels, I found the emphasis should be on teaching them the three R's. I think it's more important to teach them the basics and give them the tools to use so they can learn the rest later in life. If they get these nailed down young, the rest will come. Anything they learn in first to third grade, they will relearn from fourth on anyway. Also, young children tend to be very concrete thinkers and have trouble with more abstract thought which includes things like time and society, government, etc. So what we did was cover primarily science that could be done with experiments that young children could do hands on, and for history, we covered holidays as they came up and went to museums a lot. There is a tremendous amount that kids can pick up this way, including the use of library books, that make it better than using a curriculum. We also used Moody science videos, which can be pretty good, although you have to be careful which ones you buy. Some of the ones we got were so dated that they looked like the ones used when I was in school.
As an aside, we live in NY, which has pretty rigorous regulations, and they didn't have any problem with what we did.