Free Resources as a Supplement

I was talking to a friend today about how I use Homeschoolshare (HSS) as a supplement to Apologia Elementary Science curriculum. Several years ago, we went through the Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, but did use any supplements to it. Apologia has the student notebook what they have learned for each chapter with some fun activity, and sometimes just answering review type questions. It was fine and the boys enjoyed learning about the animals, but the notebook was not very impressive. If I had it to do over again, I would add in some of the Animal Studies just to have some variety. The Flying Creatures text covers birds and insects and I see several that we could've done:
Owls
Hummingbirds
Ducks
Birds of Prey
Backyard Birds
Bats (Stellaluna)
Praying Mantis
Bees


Last year, we did Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day and I discovered that there were several Animal Studies on HSS that helped to reinforce what we learned. For example, we generally spend 2 weeks reading about a particular chapter and notebooking on the last day of the reading the chapter. If there was a HSS study that goes with the chapter, we do it the next week - as a review. I wouldn't always use all the lapbook pieces that are available, but only the ones that had information we had learned about - or anything else that I thought was interesting. We glued them directly into our spiral bound 1 subject notebooks that they used for the notebooking activities in the Apologia book. Here are some of the Animal Studies we used for Swimming Creatures:

Whales and Dolphins:


Along with the Seals and Sea Lions chapter, they touched on Manatees:


Sea Turtles:
Sharks:
When studying Mollusks, we chose the Squid pieces and took some Octopus pieces from Nico's Octopus Unit:


Jellyfish:

There is also the Night of the Moonjellies Unit that could be done with this one.

There are others on HSS that could be go-alongs with the Swimming Creatures textbook, but we only chose these.
Coral Reefs
Seastars
And more.

This year we are doing Land Animals of the Sixth Day. I see many Animal Studies that would be go alongs for this book also, although I don't know yet which ones we will do. If you would like to see some of these, you'll have to keep watch on this blog. But here are a few I see:
Raccoons
Wolf
Wild Dogs
Tigers
Lions
Cheetah
Elephants
Marsupials
Of course there are others, and more being added.

Other Apologia science curricula offered for Elementary students are:
Astronomy - Go alongs are listed on the Connections - Outer Space page
Botany - Go alongs are listed on the Connections - Plants page
Anatomy - Two free lapbooks are My Body and Human Body (although the first might be more for the younger crowd.)

We have done Astronomy, again, without anything from HSS. Botany is on the agenda for next year and Anatomy the next year, so we have not used anything from HSS to go along with these as of yet.