We are three years into using Apologia for our science, and I love it — but I made some of my hardest-won mistakes that very first year. The curriculum is rich and beautiful and a little intimidating when you first open it, so here is what I genuinely wish someone had told me before we started: what to buy, how to stretch a single book across a full year, and how to actually get the experiments done in a busy house.
What to buy (and what you can skip)
Get the Notebooking Journal — it is the missing piece
The textbook is the heart of Apologia, but the Notebooking Journal is what turns reading into a real course. It holds the schedule, the note-taking pages, the review questions, and the activities all in one place, so you are not inventing assignments yourself. If you have younger children, the Junior Notebooking Journal uses the same lessons with more coloring and copywork and less writing. Buying the journal for each child is the single best decision we made.
You do not have to buy everything
Apologia sells audio books, MP3s, and lapbook add-ons. They are lovely, but they are extras. The textbook and a notebooking journal per child are genuinely enough to run a full, rich year. Add the audio book only if you have a struggling reader who would benefit from listening along.
Pacing a single book across the whole year
One lesson is not one day
This is the thing I got most wrong. Each lesson in an Apologia book is meant to be divided — read a few pages at a sitting, two or three sittings a week, so that one lesson stretches across one to two weeks. A book has roughly fourteen lessons, which is exactly why it lasts a full school year. If you try to read a whole lesson in one go, it feels like too much for everyone. Slow down on purpose.
Let the journal schedule carry you
The notebooking journal already lays out which pages to read on which day. On the weeks I simply followed it instead of overthinking, science was the smoothest subject of our day.
Getting the experiments done
Look ahead and gather on the weekend
Most Apologia experiments use ordinary household items, but nothing derails a science day faster than discovering at 9 a.m. that you are out of vinegar. Once a week I read ahead, make a quick list, and pull the materials into a bin so the experiment is ready to go when we reach it.
Do not skip them — but you can batch them
The hands-on experiments are where the science sticks. If a busy week gets away from you, it is fine to gather a couple of experiments and do them together on one “science day” rather than abandoning them altogether.
Teaching several ages at once
This is Apologia’s quiet superpower. Because it is written as a warm, narrative read-aloud, you can gather kids of very different ages around the same book — the littles do the Junior journal, the olders do the regular journal, and everyone is learning the same topic together. For a big family, that is a gift.
Want to see the textbook and journals side by side, plus exactly how I set up a week? Watch the original video above, and find the rest of our curriculum on my resources page.