Apologia Marine Biology (A REVIEW)

I absolutely love the ocean. In fact, when I was a kid I went to Sea World, and thought that would be a pretty awesome job to have. With that said, since I don't currently have a high schooler interested in anything marine related, I was happy to get to do this review of a homeschool marine biology course myself! I also have almost every elementary science book from Apologia Educational Ministries, so I was more than happy to see what this course has to offer.

Marine Biology 2nd Edition Advantage Set

I have to admit I was really excited to get this box of curriculum. I was hoping we'd be getting a lot of awesome stuff including the Student Notebook and the Audio CD, and we did! We received all of that along with the test-and-solutions manual. The CD doesn't come with the set, it has to be purchased separately, but I have purchased them for our other Apologia Science books, and have found them very nice to have. I will talk about each component individually for this review.

Exploring Creation with Marine Biology Textbook

First off, the textbook. This thing is packed with information, and that is why it is so very thick. I'd say about 1.5 inches or so (I didn't officially measure). I love the flow of Apologia science books, and this one is just as great. It has engaging text with experiments and questions all throughout each module, and even though it's high school there are still many colorful pictures and figures to help in the learning process. There are several experiments in each module, and in Module 6 there is even a dissection experiment of a shark. This course certainly counts as a full credit high school biology lab course!

Exploring Creation with Marine Biology Student Notebook

Next we have the Student Notebook. This notebook is almost as thick as the textbook, but it's got a place for everything! It has a place for notes for each module, all of the on your own questions with spaces to write answers, and a section for writing down results for all the experiments. Along with that, in the front section, there is a nice little schedule with a good amount of work for each day that you can check off as you go. It's a nice little feature of the Student Notebook.

A page layout from the Student Notebook of the experiment 1.1 in module 1. I did the experiment with my younger boys, so they wanted to help me with my notes too!

Our supplies for the above experiment. All the supplies are listed in the student notebook as well!

Little hands helping me with my experiment.

An example of the note page for a module. There are several pages like this for each module. Please pardon my note taking, this is the first time I've used this style of note page. I wasn't even sure why it was broke up into 3 sections, I had to look it up.

Finally we have the audio CD. The CD is nice to have if you have a learner that has trouble with the reading, or likes to have things read aloud. It would be hard to listen without the book though, as there are many figures and pictures that you just can't see with listening. I found the listening to be a little slow for my pace, and can at times feel like it drags on. But, the beautiful thing about the CD is that it is split up by sections, so you can quickly and easily find the section you want to listen to if you don't want to listen to the whole module, or if you just wanted to hear a section repeated so you can understand better.

Audio Book MP3--Can only be used on a CD player that can read MP3's. I listened to it on my computer, I didn't try it on any CD players.

Overall, I am very excited about this Marine Biology course. I wish I had a high schooler that could use it in our home this year, and that I could do it with so we could take some field trips to the coast. I learned a lot in just the short time I studied during this review, so this course covers a lot of material, and it's very thorough.

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