Apologia's Who Is My Neighbor? TOS Review

Text book and journal with our homemade lapbook on top

APOLOGIA has many quality resources for education...but this series of books about God, Self, and Neighbor are outstanding and very well done. The other books in the series are Who is God? and Who Am I?

For this review we received Who Is My Neighbor? Who Is My Neighbor? is priced at $39.00 for the book, $24.00 for the notebooking journal, and $8.00 for the coloring book.

If you click the above link you will find a sample lesson and the table of contents of this book.

This textbook focuses on the questions:

Does Anyone Really Need Me? How Can I make a Difference? Who is my Neighbor? Why did God Make Families? What Can I Do for my Country? Why Can't we all just Get Along? Who is God's Family? Why Does the Church Need Me?

From the Apologia website description: The third book in the award-winning What We Believe series helps children understand what it means to be salt and light to the world (Matthew 5:13-14). This study will encourage kids to develop a Christlike servant attitude based on these biblical truths: God created me to be a blessing to the world; God chooses to work through me; I can make a difference at home, in my community, and at church; the church is God's family; the church is one body with many gifts; and I am an important member of Jesus' body.

My daughter really enjoyed the reading we did each day...it created a time of deep thinking, and a time to ask questions about the meaning of life. I enjoyed reading the stories and concepts out loud to her too. This book is suggested for 3rd grade and up...and she's just out of 1st grade. So I adapted it to our use!
The text also comes with a "journal" and a coloring book. From the journal there are activities, writing assignments, prayers, and words to think about...plus hands on activities in the back to add to lap books.
What I did was photocopy pages I thought we could accomplish, such as the word lists, and the prayer or scripture pages, plus a few pages to color from the coloring book. I also created a lapbook for my daughter to be able to add her completed papers to, and to paste in the lapbook mini books. This way she'll be able to look back through it and remember what we talked about.

I photocopied and pasted the "schedule" into the front of the lapbook so we could check off what we've done

Some of the themes were a little over her head (will be perfect when she's a little older)...and some of the stories too long and detailed (Mom enjoyed them and read many of them!). She became a little restless in sections, but I easily skimmed over these and added my own thoughts or paraphrased certain paragraphs.
The scriptures given were a great asset to what we were discussing and she memorized them on her own without any prompting from me!

I loved that this text brought up the questions of who we are to be to our neighbors...to be more like Christ...to do things that show love...and not always things that anyone will see...sometimes just things God will see...I could tell these stories and prompts really got her mind and heart thinking. We even added some new things to her goal chart!

There are truly no cons to this review...except being able to make it age appropriate...which, as a parent you should be able to condense certain things for your use...
This text can be used over and over each year, so the child will get different things out it as he matures.

We loved the coloring book which is great for keeping the younger ones occupied while mom or older kids are reading aloud. (It would have been totally awesome to have the coloring pages matched up with the lesson for us, so we can quickly go to that page).

I highly recommend this series to everyone who needs a greater understanding of Christ's work in our lives. I am excited to try the first two texts in this series too...
We'll be continuing in this text until we're finished, and then start on the first in the series. Don't forget you can reuse this text as the child grows. There are important things in there for teenager and preteens to think about!

Click HERE to read more Apologia reviews from the TOS Crew.
***Disclaimer: As a member of TOS Crew, Different Dog received this product for free in exchange for our honest opinion on the product. All opinions are our own. Ruff!