2nd Edition Apologia Science Notebooks with 1st Edition Textbooks

Do you have the 1st edition Apologia science notebooks? Are you wondering if you can you can use the 2nd edition Young Explorers notebooks with them? This blog is here to help!

 

Deciding What To Do

I was given a full set of Apologia’s Young Explorers science textbooks in 2022 while living overseas in Korea. All except for Botany. I was very excited and grateful! The 1st edition books I received were published in 2004. The 2nd edition of the series was released in 2016. I paid to ship them back to Australia when we relocated, again. After realizing I wasn’t going to find the 1st edition notebooks easily, or affordably, I agonized over three options:

1. Use the 1^st edition textbooks without the notebooks. This would involve making my own worksheets and/or buying some that are available from Teachers Pay Teachers. This would save money but cost a lot of time.

 

2. Use the 1^st edition textbooks with the 2nd edition notebooks and make it work. This was a difficult one. I didn’t know how much would align between the old and new texts, and the content index isn’t enough to make a confident choice. Also, each notebook costs around A$80.

 

3. Forget about the first edition textbooks that I’d hauled from overseas and buy everything new – 2^nd edition textbooks and notebooks. This seemed like such a waste after all the effort to bring them across the ocean.

 

I finally settled on option two, and have used this method for the first two textbooks I had from the Young Explorers series: Astronomy and Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day. How did it go, and was it worth it? Let’s dive in and see what you think!

 

What was different between the 1^st and 2^nd editions of Astronomy?

 

 

Aligning the old and new additions for Astronomy was a breeze really. I came to love Apologia science after studying this Astronomy course in our homeschool. The 2^nd edition textbook follows the same order as the 1^st edition and the experiments are pretty much the same.

The only differences are as follows ~

 

1. Uranus and Neptune each have their own chapter in the 2^nd edition, rather than being combined.

 

 

2. The issue about Pluto not being a planet anymore is big in the 1^st edition textbook, but it’s not such a drama now that time has passed. For that reason, we skipped through some of the Pluto controversy activities suggested in the 1st edition textbook. Pluto plays a much smaller role in the 2^nd edition. Poor Pluto is now just another dwarf planet! The lesson in the 1^st edition named “Pluto and the Kuiper Belt” is now “Kuiper Belt and Dwarf Planets.”

 

 

I had to source some pics and info for the dwarf planets from Twinkl to complete the 2^nd edition notebook activities, seeing as the 1^st edition textbook didn’t feature them. This worked well enough though. What do you think?

 

 

 

If you want your family never to forget the names of the dwarf planets, try this song here. We had so much fun singing it over and over.

 

 

3. In the 1^st edition, the lessons Stars and Galaxies are separated from Space Travel. In the 2^nd edition, they are merged.

 

4. The ice-cream experiment is in the Pluto and the Kuiper Belt lesson in the 1^st It features in the lesson on Neptune in the 2^nd edition.

 

5. Some extra info pops up in crosswords and review questions which isn’t found in the 1^st edition. I checked these activities in advance and looked up any topics that we hadn’t covered in the 1^st edition textbook. Then I added a few sentences of info into the relevant lesson before the kids did the activities. Again, not a lot of work.

 

6. The first edition was written in 2004, so obviously a few of the events the book talks about as coming up in the future, have already been and gone. I thought this was cool though. We got to see how these events were viewed with such excitement at the time. Then we went to the library and borrowed books about what actually happened. For example, the New Horizons spacecraft that launched in 2006 and completed a Pluto flyby in 2015. Also, the Cassini Mission to Saturn at the time the 1^st edition was being published. This issue didn’t take away from our study, it actually enhanced it.

 

For me, doing the little bit of extra work to make the 1^st edition Astronomy textbooks work with the 2^nd edition notebooks was worthwhile.  We had tons of fun doing the experiments.

 

Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day

 

 

Hahaha, moving on to Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day. If you thought that aligning Astronomy looked like way too much effort, you might just want to completely skip this part and forget about the whole idea for Zoology 1.

What is required to make the 1^st edition textbook and 2^nd edition notebook work for Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day?

If you’re still with me, let’s jump right in and I’ll share what I found and how I’ve approached it.

 

1. I would say that a lot of content is the same in the 1^st and 2^nd editions, which I expected based on my experience with Astronomy. There is far less outdated information in this textbook compared to Astronomy as well. However, it’s like they split the original edition in half and swapped the lessons in the middle. So, all of the bird lessons which were in the first half of the book in the 1st edition, got switched to the end of the book, starting from lesson 9. This is no big deal really. We just did the first lesson on Zoology and jumped straight to lesson 9 to start with birds.

 

 

 

2. I’m not gonna lie. You’ll have to deal with other mix-ups in lesson sections as well. It took me several hours of reading through the textbook and matching what had been added in or cut out of the 2^nd edition notebook. There are too many to list them all here, but I didn’t mind the work. It forced me to go through our science curriculum in advance and plan it well. I appreciated that.

 

3. While many of the experiments are the same, several have either been added or dropped compared to the 1^st  edition. How am I dealing with this? I’m simply finding instructions for the science experiments that look interesting and forgetting the others. How am I finding them if they are only listed without instructions in the 2^nd edition notebook? Through YouTube mainly.

 

In these pictures you can see my approach to matching the notebook activities with the textbook. If the experiment or activity was mentioned in the 1st edition textbook, I simply gave it a tick in the 2nd edition notebook and noted the page where it could be found.

 

 

If it wasn’t found in the first edition I marked it with an ‘explore online’ if I wished to pursue it. I thought this balloon experiment in the 2nd edition was a wonderful way to show how air has weight. I found the experiment on YouTube and was able to complete this notebook activity.

 

 

 

Despite the amount of work needed to align the 1^st edition Zoology 1 textbook with the new notebooks, I’m still glad I took the time. It was definitely workable for me. Seeing as I had spent all that time matching the books, I felt really prepared to teach the content.

 

Was it Worth It?

 

Overall, yes. Call me crazy, but now that I have done this for the first two books in the series, I intend to go ahead and use the 2^nd edition notebooks with the last three Young Explorers textbooks I have sitting on my curriculum shelf too.

If you have been trying to figure out what to do with this problem as well, I hope this post was helpful. If you have any specific questions please feel free to drop them either in the comments section, over at Facebook, or directly via email (greatjoyeveryday@gmail.com).

God bless you and have a wonderful day,

Naomi.