DISCLAIMER. I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
Do you have a need for some science? Perhaps like us, you need to round out a health portion of a physical education course. Or perhaps you need a reminder or even an introduction to science topics? My son and I have been working on the Biochemistry/Microbiology half-semester courses from Greg Landry’s Homeschool Science. The combination of video along with worksheets has worked well for him. I’d like to tell you more about it.
What have we been reviewing?
Self-Paced (recorded) Online Classes by Greg Landry for grades 7-12 grade. Of the five courses available we chose the biochemistry/microbiology course. Mr Landry conducts his online classes with the goal of having students work at their own pace. Mr. Landry teaches the video lessons himself. Each class has a study guide which comes in PDF form. Some pages are coloured which give additional information. Learning which of those pages is coloured if you only have a black and white printer is initally a problem but it quickly becomes obvious. 🙂 This course is worth a 1/2 credit in high school science.
Students can communicate with Professor Landry via email if they have any questions during the lessons. Tuition is $120. As Mr. Landry teaches the lessons the students can watch him interacting with the whiteboard and pointing to graphics and what not.
How is it set up?
You’ll need to open an account with Canvas as that is what the lessons run on. When you click on a class link, the lesson opens into a new window. Seven classes were conducted in the Biochemistry/Microbiology course that we took. The lad thought the immunology lesson would be interesting. All the worksheets are contained within a single PDF that you can download and print off.
Faith plays a role in how Mr. Landry conducts his life and leads his classes. Scripture is part of the PDF lessons. Lessons open in prayer and verses will be found in the PDF.
All of your students can use the one course which means how ever many students you have needing to take a course, they can all take it at the same time. So if you have students in grade 7-12, they can all take the labs and/or half-semester courses together! You have a whole year to complete it in, so if your students work best on their own that’s an option as well.
How is it put together?
Your students will find this a very easy course to navigate. Once they get signed into Canvas each lesson opens up into a new window. The video lesson does not start playing automatically, and my son appreciated that he could speed up the rate of play. NO, I do not get how he can listen that fast, but it works for him, and he’s quite accurate. So whenever online lessons allow for that option he’s delighted! 🙂 The lesson takes centre stage as you can tell from the image below.
Encouragement to Develop Good Study Habits
Students are encouraged to take good study notes, and my lad promised to get me a screenshot of his notes but he’s gotten rather busy. It’s good to know notes were taken, but …. getting them in time for this review? I don’t think it’s gonna happen! The lad did ask me if it was okay if for filling out the worksheets if he could use the “coloured sheets”. I asked him what he was talking about and why he would ask. Apparently Mr. Landry tells his students to fill out the worksheets to the best of their ability and if they couldn’t to use the Coloured Sheets to fill out the rest. The lad wasn’t sure if that would be cheating or not.
The lad continued his explanation that Mr. Landry would explain part of the material, but didn’t cover everything so the encouragement was to complete their education. This means it wasn’t ‘cheating’ to use the coloured sheets to complete the worksheets. Every lesson has worksheets to fill out. NOW, if I were wanting to test his knowledge I probably could have said “no worksheets, I want to see what you know”. But given that not all the information was given in the video lesson I wouldn’t have liked that option without giving some good study time as well.
Now as I stop to think about it, I could have easily assigned additional work in the form of a paper/essay. Research something you learned about and present it in one of these 40 ways.
What did we think of Biochemistry/Microbiology?
We struggled to find the time to work on this together. With part-time jobs, our schedules didn’t often fit together. So our goals to do this together and have mom/son time didn’t pan out the way we wanted it to. The lad ended up watching the videos in random order Comments from the lad, a grade 11 student
- One: “What if I don’t think drawing pictures will help me really remember information well? Do I have to do that mom? I don’t think highlighting words by drawing them big will help me remember them any better than just writing normally.” We actually watched this lesson together and had a good discussion over the pros and cons of different studying methods.
- Two: “I covered this really well in my biology class already. And the diagrams were simple, they didn’t go indepth on anything.”
- Three: “He didn’t give enough detail.”
- Four:
- Five: “I liked this lesson and found it well done. Learning about bacteria and antibiotics, it was really interesting.”
- Six: “He went off on a tangent telling a personal story, but otherwise he did a good job on the lymph system.”
- Seven: “It was a decent lesson, but he only covered the basics”.
Overall the lad and I decided that these would be a good homeschool science classes online for higher elementary or lower highschool students to take. It would be good to do the study skills one in grade 9. Other than lesson five most of the material he viewed he had already studied and would assume most grade 11 students would have as well.
Greg Landry on Social Media
As far as I can tell, Greg Landry and his homeschool science courses are not on social media.
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#hsreviews #homeschoolscience #scienceresources #scienceexperiments #scienceiscool #homeschoolchemistry #homeschoolbiology #homeschoolscienceexperiment
What did Crew Members Review?
19 members of the crew reviewed different parts of Greg Landry’s Homeschool Science programs.
– self paced online – start any time
– biology / anatomy and physiology
– chemistry
– physics
2. Self-paced 4th-7th grade one-semester classes…
– Young Scientist : Anatomy & Physiology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics or Earth & Space Science.
3. Self-paced 7th-12th grade half-semester classes
– Exercise & Sports Physiology
– Biochemistry / Microbiology
– Embryology / Endocrinology
– Earth & Space Science
– Study Skills / Measurement / Lab Reports / Graphing
I do urge you to read the reviews by the crew. You’ll find we all had varied experiences which will help bring this online homeschool science program to life!
Sounds like it was a good review with a tad new information for him. That’s not bad for a short course like this.
I don’t know, I guess I expected more, but shouldn’t have.