[Kimberly]

Hello! I’m excited to use Devotional Biology with my 9th and 10th grade kids this year. We also do homeschool speech and debate, and the resolution for Lincoln Douglas this year is about biomedical engineering – so this is a great resource to dovetail in what we’re learning. We will likely be joining another family and doing it together once a week. My thought is that we can discuss a chapter on one week (after we’ve watched the lectures and done the reading ourselves at home), using the test questions as a guide. And then the next week we can do a lab together. Has anyone else used this in a small group setting? What do you think?

[Thomas Purifoy, Jr.]

I taught it to a small group of kids last year (9th-10th graders). They read/watched videos at home, then we talked in class. The discussion part works really well. One of the things we did was either to assign 5 to 10 of the “test” questions at the end so that the kids could prepare them (or let them choose the ones they wanted to do), then go through those in class. These usually led to discussions. The test questions can easily be done in class with a group. Many of the labs take a while to do (4+ hours), so I found that having the kids do the labs on their own then bring their results to class to present was a good way to do it. I will say this: the material is not easy, but we found the kids really responded to it and it expanded their thinking.

[Kimberly]

Thank you! That is helpful to know about the length of the labs. I’m glad you suggested having the kids focus on preparing some of the test questions for discussion ahead of time. Based on my previous experience with co-ops, I think that’s the way to go.