Apologia users...

[twoblessings]

Did anyone do Chemistry and then Biology? If you did, how did it work out and what grade did you do it in?

Thanks!

[Michelle in MO]

although that probably doesn't answer your question! I would say you probably could do Chemistry first and then Biology, but I would make certain that your child's understanding of Algebra I was very solid. In high schools, Chemistry is normally done in 11th grade. We're doing it this year, in 10 grade, and we did the Biology last year.

Honestly, I'm glad we did Biology first. My oldest is doing well with Chemistry, but has to work extremely hard to understand the concepts. I found that there was lots of memorization in Biology---all the vocabulary terms, etc. I think that gave her a year to really learn to work hard at science, because it was last year that we started to do some science every Saturday. (We tend to work in "blocks" of time in the afternoons for history and science, so history is M-W-F and science is now T-Th-Sat.) So, for my non-mathy-type dd, doing a year of Biology first was beneficial, learning how to memorize all the vocabulary terms and just, in general, working much harder than she did with Physical Science the year before. For her, if I had done Chemistry first, it probably would have killed her! In fact, I think next year I'm going to have her do another science, perhaps the Advanced Biology or Marine Biology (or something at the community college) that isn't so math-intensive, before having her do Physics.

However, having said all that, I would say that if you have a child who is much more proficient at math than my dd (and I know we can't compare them side-by-side! :) ) that you would be able to do Chemistry first!

Does that help---or only confuse the issue! I hope it helps!