The Difference Between the Manuals and Textbook Approach

The High School Sciences in Your Home manuals are different than the traditional textbook approach.  Each Student Manual comes three-hole punched so the student can put it in a notebook where he/she can add answers to their weekly research questions and where their labwork/dissection section is for the student to fill out.  The notebook provides a place to include completed quizzes to help locate them when it comes time to study for the end-of-semester final exam.  

Each week the student has a series of questions that he/she needs to find the answers.  I highly recommend "real" books (not textbooks) or websites that are written by people who are excited about the topic.  This excitement is conveyed in their writing.  The student will read much more than would be written in a standard textbook, and will have to process all that information to be able to answer the question.  This thinking process and then the writing of their answer leads to the student understanding the topic.  If the student understands it he/she will remember it more easily than if memorized.

The Parent Manual has the bare minimum answers for the student's research, in other words, what the high school student should have learned about the topic.  My goal is for every student to be so excited about all that he/she discovered that week that he/she will tell the parent much more than what is written in the Parent Manual.  Also, it has all the answers to all the quizzes and final exams, and all the answers/diagrams to all the labs/dissections.  All are within one spiral bound manual, with four tabs to easily locate the research questions for each semester, quizzes or lab/dissections.