It’s a Zoo Out There! Apologia Review

There are so many interesting animals to learn about.  Our favorite family field trip is to the local zoo.  We have been going since our oldest was an infant and still enjoy it 8 years later with five children.  It will come as no surprise to you, then, to find that we love studying animals in homeschool.  Being a unit study family, we have made many units on our own.  This past year we found a textbook that is perfectly adapted to unit studies.

Exploring Creation with Land Animals of the Sixth Day is the third in a series of Zoology books offered by Apologia Science.  We looked at each of the zoology book’s topics, samples, and table of contents before my oldest chose to begin with Zoology 3 because so many of her favorite animals from the zoo are covered in this book.

Things we love:

• Written in an easy conversational style directed at the student – this makes it a perfect read aloud for our family.
• Beautiful photography – who is not inspired by amazing photographs of animals?
• Christian Perspective – a book that openly celebrates God’s creative powers and his amazing designs.
• Experiments that work – directions lay out each step, a materials list is in the front of the book, and experiments really apply to the topics in each chapter.

With 14 chapters packed full of information this book can fill an entire academic year.  We use it a little differently, picking it up when we want to do a unit study about a specific animal family, then putting it away again until we’re ready for more animal adventures.  That means we have only finished a little over 1/3 of the book this year.  My eight year old loves the book so much that she has read it nearly cover to cover already on her own.  She takes it to her room and reads during quiet time.  Many times this year she has come to tell me all about the things she has learned, or to ask a question the reading has brought up.

While we do not have many textbooks in our home, I have found the Exploring Creation series to be a wonderful fit for our unit study family.  We will be investing in the rest of the series in the coming years.

Written by Tristan, mom to 5, homeschooling through unit studies with a side of lapbooks.  You can visit her at her blog, Our Busy Homeschool.

{Disclaimer because the FTC says I have to:  I bought this book with my own money, and yes, we really use it.  All opinions presented herein are my own.}

Elephant image courtesy of Tim Seed / FreeDigitalPhotos.net