When in your homeschool do you teach engineering, anyway? How about junior high? With the right curriculum and engaging material, young students can build an appreciation of God’s creation and it’s application to modern design. Applied Engineering: Studies of God’s Design in Nature MasterBooks provides a unique curriculum for junior high science. This simple course offers a wealth of information students will enjoy. The complete curriculum comes in four books: a consumable Parent Lesson Planner, Discovery of Design, Made in Heaven, and Champions of Invention. The Parent Lesson Planner is the heart of the course. It begins with a brief instruction on how to use the full-year program. Next follows the planner, which gives daily assignments with a box for the student to check completion and a place for grades. The bulk of the Parent Lesson Planner, however, is actually a consumable student workbook. Each lesson includes 5-10 brief questions on the day’s reading. The questions are straightforward, and even my writing-adverse student had no problem completing each assignment quickly. After the worksheets come the quizzes and …

Homeschoolers often view vocabulary as an afterthought . . . until the college entrance tests loom large. While good literature reading and healthy writing training greatly improve a student’s command of English, that usually isn’t enough. Students need training in the building blocks of English words. Jensen’s Vocabulary Vocabulary by Frode Jensen teaches students to recognize common Latin and Greek word parts to decipher for themselves new words they meet. Instead of looking up words in a dictionary or even memorizing definitions, students are trained to identify the Latin or Greek root of a word to discern the meaning, memorize the root, determine the word’s prefix or suffix, then use the word in a sentence. The course is divided into three parts: 18 lessons of Latin I, 18 lessons of Latin II, and 18 lessons of Greek. Each group of lessons focuses on that language and a specific list of root words, so as the course progresses, students become increasingly confident identifying word meanings. Each lesson contains four parts, with an extra day for review or testing: Match …