Get Excited with Supercharged Science Online Curriculum
Supercharged Science is an online homeschool science program that looks to set your child’s love of science into motion with the e-Science Homeschool Science Curriculum. We received a full year membership to review.
About Supercharged Science
Aurora Lipper is the mastermind behind Supercharged Science. A mechanical engineer with a PhD from Stanford, she is the red head you will see in all the videos teaching your children. She has a lively personality that exudes her passion for science.
Supercharged Science encompasses all level of learners. There is material available for grades 1-12. If you are homeschooling a wide range of ages, this allows you to have one curriculum that meets all their needs.
The online science curriculum can be approached from two different ways. The first way is to have your students study by grade level, where the focus is on scientific concepts kids normally learn at that level. The second way is by topics.
Each month you are given access to 1-2 additional units, which have between 60-80 experiments. If you go by grade level, then you have access to the units within that grade level. She does note, however, that if there is one you really want to try, but don’t have access to, to contact her for special access.
We choose to study by topics. I pretty much gave Ellawyn (11) and Haydn (9) free reign to choose whatever interested them and learn about it.
Online Science Curriculum–The Lessons and Experiments
The lessons within a unit are typically comprised of readings, a video, experiments and exercises.
The beginning of each unit first gives a small introduction and then it lists the scientific concepts which will be covered. This is really nice for the parent as you can quickly see what you should expect in terms of learning.
Next you click on a science experiment. This link will take you to the reading and give you information for the experiment. This is meant to be a very hands on curriculum. There are myriad experiments to choose from. Life Sciences, for example, has 37 experiments listed. You could choose to do all of them, for a thorough unit study or to only do a selection.
After you’ve completed the experiments, then there is an assessment you can print. This contains some lab write ups, open questions and a quiz. The one for life sciences was 10 pages long.
My kids had fun picking what experiments they wanted to do and thus, what they wanted to learn about. Often, they chose what to learn about based on whether or not the experiment looked interesting.
She also gives instructions for how to keep a science journal. This is an informal lab experiments book. It is a way for children to write down what they learned from an experiment and not worry so much about making it sound scientific.
Extras
Apologia Science Labs
If you are an Apologia fan, she has all the experiments for Middle School and High School on her site. After working through the Apologia experiments, if the student needs more practice or help, then there are corresponding courses on the site.
She also lists experiments that are more fun and easier to do or are simply better experiments than the ones in the textbook, so if you were wanting alternatives, she does the work for you.
Resources
Included on the site are resources for the homeschool mom. These are articles or tele-seminars to give instruction and encouragement to the homeschool mom. Topics include What does my child really need to learn in science, Seven biggest mistakes made in teaching science, and The six keys to teaching homeschool science, along with several more. So this isn’t a site just for the kids.
How We Liked the e-Science Homeschool Science Curriculum
As I mentioned earlier, I let my kids explore whatever interested them. The topics work really well for this. There was a good variety for labs and my daughter liked that they included a shopping list she could print out for me. We like to do labs all on one day, so this worked nicely.
They did both find the website a little difficult to navigate at first and this made them less eager to use it even though they did enjoy it. My daughter had a hard time deciding the order she was supposed to go in after the reading. My son didn’t realize there was reading until his sister pointed it out and was just watching the videos.
They are redoing aspects of the site, so this may get fixed and be a complete non-issue. Otherwise, I would familiarize yourself with the site first and help your kids navigate it in the beginning. Once my kids figured it out, it was fine. There were just the few bumps getting started.
As for the curriculum, they did enjoy it. They liked that it was very hands on. Doing the experiments was probably their favorite part.
We were pretty laid back in our learning with this. For the lower grades I like to focus on making science fun and not so much on drills or boring text and tests. This fit nicely for that, but it also had the structure that I look for with the older grades.
I appreciated there were assessments if I wanted to use them and instructions for science journals if I wanted my kids to keep them.
This flexibility makes it a good fit for a variety of learning and teaching styles.
Try it Out
She does offer a free class, so you can see if it will fit your child’s learning style.
Otherwise, click the link below to read more Crew reviews.
