Evan-Moor: ScienceWorks for Kids Series

I absolutely love to find products that help with our hands on approach of learning. I’ve come across another wonderful product from Evan-Moor publishing called ScienceWorks for Kids Series. Full of hands on activities, projects, experiments, and much more.

Evan-Moor: ScienceWorks for Kids Books Include:

• Step by step instructions with illustrations to help you teach each lesson quickly and easily.
• Record Sheets
• Logbook forms
• Mini books to cut out, assemble and color
• Picture cards to help in reinforcing the lessons
• Reproducible pages so you can use the book over and over again
• Experiments
• Reading resources-books to help tie in each lesson
• Movie resources
• Worksheets for reinforcement
• And more

What I love about this curriculum is the log book. It mentions it’s a classroom log but we used it after each lesson to write down what we remembered about that lesson after it was completed. For us there was no wrong or right answer. It was to demonstrate the knowledge they received during that time period. Something they can go back to later for review.

After reading each concept, my children loved reading the mini-books and assembling them. This brought the concept to their level of understanding. There is also a lot of opportunities during each lesson for group discussions while making hands on activities and experiments.

The ScienceWorks series comes in three different age groups:

Grades K-1

Animals
Plants
My Body
Weather
The Earth

Grades 1-3

Exploring Space
Animals with Backbones
Animals without Backbones
How Your Body Works
Geology
Plants
Habitats
Simple Machines
Energy: Light, Heat, & Sound
Water

Grades 4-6

Weather
Human Body
Simple Chemistry
Energy
Planet Earth
Living Things

Some Project Examples for How Your Body Works

Make a Book About Me, Make a collage, five senses walk, skeleton puzzle, inside my body, match the smells, name that taste and much, much more.

Experiments include:

Looking at your skin through a magnified glass, Fingerprints, lots of five senses experiments, respiration model, counting your heartbeats, bones need calcium experiment and much, much more.

Experiment Examples for Plants

Seed exploration, plant parts dissection, growing seeds in a bag, sunlight experiment, and much more

You can use these books as a stand alone to teach these concepts or they are easily used to supplement what you are already using. We use lap booking while using these books and it really helps build more understanding and allows more hands on activities to help my children grasp the concepts being taught. I would highly recommend these books for those that like to color, cut, paste, do experiments and overall love to work with their hands while learning.

To benefit the most out these books you will need to purchase extra items to do the experiments. Each concept tells you what you will need to buy and gives you a few different things per concept so you have things to choose from or you can do all of them. I felt they were all inexpensive to purchase or you may already have the items in your home. There is also a list of books to help enhance the study and should be available at your local library.

More Hands-On Science Options

Motion and Force Activities for Kids: Hands-On Physical Science for Homeschool – This is a collection of hands-on physical science experiments you can do in your homeschool with your kids for exploring motion and force.

Educational and Fun Chemical Reactions Activities for Kids – A collection of fun at home science experiments to demonstrate a myriad of chemistry concepts. Everything from exploding volcanoes to candy science, there is something here to delight any reluctant learner!

~ Originally posted September 2009, Written by Lynn Pitts, mom of 3, from Big Sky Country Montana.