Why no BFSU 3-5 posts?

Some of my most popular posts on the blog are the Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding unit study approach posts. I've been asked a few times why there are no posts for the 3-5 book once we finished the K-2 book. There are two reasons. The first is simply that the prerequisites in the 3-5 book (and the 6-8 book) don't jump around threads nearly as much as the K-2 book, making it much easier to just work your way through each thread from top to bottom. The other reason, however, is that we stopped using a science curriculum.

Don't get me wrong, I still have the BFSU 3-5 and 6-8 books on the shelf. They've been fantastically useful when The Kid asks about a topic and I don't even know how to get started breaking down the concepts for her. I just look up the concept she is asking about, then follow the prerequisites backwards until I can see the path to get from here to there. It gives me ideas on how to do that. It lists books that I can reserve at the library.

But I slowly realized, as our time with BFSU K-2 was coming to an end, that The Kid was more htan ready to lead her own science education. She read the books on her own. She asked to listen to lectures or watch documentaries about science. She started taking things apart to figure out how they worked. She wanted extensive time and depth on particular subjects. And she wanted to go further and deeper than any curriculum was going to take her.

Hogwarts Battle

 

Anyone else with kids super obsessed with Harry Potter? These books are some of the only fiction that The Kid chooses to actually reread. She role plays stuff from the books any time she can find another kid to play with. She even learned a bunch of Quidditch terms in French. It's a little ridiculous.

But we do totally agree on this game. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a cooperative game; all players are working together to defeat the villains before the villains can capture a set of locations. You play as a HP character, you cast spells and use magical items in order to attack, you get stunned instead of dying, and everyone wins or loses together. The game is progressive in that when you beat Year 1, you move on to Year 2 the next time you play. If you lose, you replay the year until you win. Each year alters the rules a bit and adds complexity, so it starts very simple and ends up as a fairly complex (and long!) game by Year 7.

The expansion pack, Monster Box of Monsters is also excellent. It's an add-on for after you've beaten the entire base game.