Any Students out there doing Robinson Curriculum or A2 Curriculum???

Question

I was wondering what its like and if you'd recommend it?? Would it be a significant education in science for someone planning to be a doctor????

Also are there any New Zealanders out there doing it? I'd still like to hear from you even if you're not from New Zealand

Answer 1

We used it for a few years for my oldest who was a voracious reader. Our tiny country library could not supply us with enough quality books to keep up with his appetite. We wore out two printers during that time keeping him in books. He was a kid that took the dictionary into the bathroom for pleasure reading. He loved words! At the end of the two years he scored in the 99th percentile in both vocabulary and reading comprehension on standardized tests. That was then though; now you can get almost 100% of the same titles free on the internet via online libraries such as Project Gutenberg, Classics for Young People, Bartleby, etc. Considering the internet, the Robinson curriculum is less useful than it was ten years ago. The free, online texts are searchable and you can download them into mobile devices because they are text-based. However, the Robinson Curriculum books are image scans, so you lose some of the ease of file adaptability. If my youngest one coming up now had the voracious appetite of my oldest one, I wouldn't be buying Robinson now, I would spend the money instead on a portable device to make the online text reading comfortable without the need of printing all those books.

As to the science side of things, the homeschool father that publishes the curriculum is a scientist himself. The upper level books for science in the curriclum are quite challenging and easily equivalent to college level course texts. From our university's library, we checked out the video series that was published to go along with the physics texts included in the curriculum (The Mechanical Universe and Beyond the Mechanical Universe). That was excellent! I found out that I could request that our state's Department of Education to air the series in the middle of the night on our PBS channel. I did and recorded the series for time shifting so we didn't have to keep driving 170 miles round trip every week to check the next tape out from the university library. I would suggest that you look on line to see if the science texts are available free online or for less money than the Robinson Curiiculum from the CalTech bookstore before purchasing the curriculum. I also highly recommend getting the Fennymen (spelling?) Lectures from Caltech or see if they are now online free. Robinson highly recommended them in the curriculum so we accessed them. They were fantastic! From the sound of your post, my guess is that you are already in high school and probably able to go right into the science texts provided in Robinson so long as your math skills are solid. The texts are calculus, not algebra-based (most high school texts use algebra for science-based math). You will need to be far enough along in your math to understand the calculus.

As good as the upper level texts are, in my opinion there isn't enough built in science that leads up to it. If you use Saxon or another excellent math text you will be ready for the math side of things, but I would suggest making sure that you have a lab-oriented curriculum prior to the math oriented ones in the curriculum. His kids naturally had lots of opportunities to get lab and concept instruction prior to the texts in the Robinson curriculum because Dr. Robinson's lab was right there on their farm, but unless you too have a scientist father, you wouldn't have that without looking outside of the curriculum. We loved hands on science, so it wasn't a problem for us to add in the science at the earlier levels.

Answer 2

We recently purchased the A2 Curriculum, as I didn't want to make the investment into the Robinson until I was sure it was a style that would work for my sons.

Thus far, I rate it 3 stars out of 5.  The math section is really good for elementary, but once you get to algebra and so forth, you'll need to switch to a secondary textbook source, such as Saxon math.  

The history is strongly American oriented in the lower grades, as are the reading materials, which might be an issue for you.

I found the language arts to be a bit too antiquated and just bought a grammar book that had a humorous bent to use as a supplement to having the boys do a lot of writing exercises and correcting their grammar "in action" rather than by rote worksheets.

The spelling, however, is nice.  Lots of lessons, but lots of printing needed.

Science isn't included in the curriculum, but there is a list of subjects that each grade level should cover.  This leaves you to make trips to the library to fill that need, which works for us (we're more "unschoolers" than anything hardcore curriculum) but might not for you if you want something science-heavy.

Overall, it's not the worst curriculum we've tinkered with, especially considering the $99 price, but it's not anywhere near the best.  Honestly, I think Ambleside Online is a better resource than A2 (and probably Robinson) - and it's free.  http://amblesideonline.org/