For Science:

Norah had a thorough introduction to plant and animal life last year. There's no way I could even list the books she read and reread on these topics. There were hundreds! In fact, she is still reading new books about insects and plants every day.

But she has done very little reading on the human body this year, interestingly enough. I think this is because there aren't as many books on this topic for young readers. At least, I find it much harder to find real books on this topic. For all the books we have purchased or come across at the library, it seems like probably only one in ten is about the human body.

Therefore, we are going to use Apologia's Human Anatomy and Physiology as our next main book for science in second grade. We are also using their Junior Notebooking Journal to go along with the textbook. This book should give Norah a comprehensive understanding of her body parts, body systems, etc. I would rather let Norah read the same content through real books, but like I said, I just can't find enough real books that cover the content in the amount of detail that we desire.

This book may take us a full school year to complete. It's designed to take that long. But we may find we want to go through the lessons in double time. I think we will just have to see. I will probably base it on Norah's desires. If we finish with one section and she's asks for more, we will do more. I plan to let Norah do the bulk of the reading. (She learns more when she's the reader.) I think she will also enjoy all the experiments. I just hope the text isn't too dull and that there are enough pictures to awe her visually. She's gotten used to real books filled with vivid photographs.

The Well Trained Mind recommends several resources for studying the human body such as Human Anatomy Floor Puzzle, Somebody: Five Human Anatomy Board Games and Rookie Read About Health books, so we plan to use those to supplement our study.

This year will also be a test to see whether or not I like using textbooks, something I have avoided till now. If I do, I will probably use some of Apologia's other science books in the future (like their elementary level Astronomy). But, I've found several real books on Astronomy already, so we may not find that we need to use a textbook to cover that content.

I am not thrilled with the prospect of getting off The Well Trained Mind's four year schedule for the sciences by taking so much time to do an intensive study of the human body. But, I feel confident that we can still cover all the sciences we need to cover before middle school and use all The Well Trained Mind's resources we want to use by incorporating these things into Norah's free reading, our free time, our evenings together as a family, our lazy weekends and even our summers.

I'm counting on the fact that home school provides time and freedom and opportunity to do all things well, so that's why we're taking extra time to study the human body for the next several months.