The Rainbow Scope and Sequence

The Rainbow Scope and Sequence

A Teacher’s Guide to Its Contents

In The Rainbow’s two-year textbook you will find the same topics and organization that might be found in any college textbook to give comprehensive and programmatic coverage to the subject matter. It is written to a junior high school audience, not only in terms of technical content, but also in terms of writing style.

Following this introduction is a table of contents that is annotated with explanations of the subjects introduced to the student in the corresponding lessons of the text. Each text lesson corresponds to one day of reading for the home schooled student. Each reading is short because it focuses on concepts that will be reinforced again and again during the course of these text studies, illuminated through The Rainbow Home Laboratory and utilized in everyday life. It does not submerge the student in reams of facts that will soon be forgotten and that are available in any good encyclopedia. Instead, it provides exercises through which the students demonstrate their acceptance of the concepts which will be reinforced visually, tactilely and kinesthetically in the laboratory exercises.

To provide a taste of the writing style, scientific quality and content of the program, the first few chapters from each section are provided for your reading pleasure. We hope you will find it imaginative, humorous, and engaging, but we are sure you will find it both technically accurate and teachable. Remember, the Teacher’s Helper is supplied with the text package to provide answers to all of the exercises and laboratories, and to allow you to understand at a glance what the student is to have learned from the text on a given day.

The text is illustrated with high-quality, high-color photography and art work at each opening. It is self-pronouncing and has both a glossary of terms and a thorough index.

Thank you for considering our curriculum. If you have questions, please call us toll free at (800) 831-3570. Email us dcdobbins@aol.com

…true science…always.

Physics—The Study of the Principles that Govern the Universe.

  1. Inertia and Flying Objects (Newton’s first law of motion)
  2. Jumping Off of Asteroids in Outer Space (Newton’s second and third laws of motion)
  3. Gravity and Gravitation
  4. Acceleration Due to Gravity
  5. Play Ball! (Motion under two or more forces)
  6. Making Waves (Fluid motion)
  7. Do Something Useful! (Introduction of work)
  8. Falling Up (Potential energy)
  9. What’s That Got to Do with Being Useful? (Energy)
  10. The Price of Being Useful (Energy)
  11. Hide and Seek with an Oofglork (Energy forms and transformations)
  12. Conservation of Energy
  13. Forces (Gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear forces formally introduced)
  14. Electric Force (Static electricity)
  15. To Flow or Not to Flow (Electrical current)
  16. Electric Work (Electricity and work)
  17. Magnetic Force (The relationship between electricity and magnetism)
  18. What’s Left? (The nuclear forces)
  19. Count Your Many Protons (Easy particle physics and the periodic table)
  20. The Proton Repulsion Problem (Description of the strong nuclear force)
  21. Storing Up Energy Against the Forces (Potential energy works the same for all forces)
  22. Artificial Forces (Comparing forces generated by us to the natural forces)
  23. Mass-Energy (A first easy glimpse at Einstein’s relativity, and an intro. to a comparison of the different types of energy in the lessons that follow)
  24. Heat Energy
  25. Light Energy
  26. Light and Matter (How light interacts with matter)
  27. Black and White (Understanding light and its absence)
  28. Color (The physical meaning of color)
  29. Changing the Color of an Object (Pigments)
  30. The Science of Light Bending (Ways light can be manipulated)

Chemistry—A Study of Substances, Their Properties, and Their Interactions.

  1. Impress Your Friends! (An introduction to arouse the student’s interest in chemistry)
  2. Packaging Stuff (An introduction to the basic properties of matter, beginning with an intuitive definition of solids, liquids and gases—phases of matter)
  3. How Much Stuff is in Stuff? (An intuitive definition of mass)
  4. Properties of Matter: Density (An intuitive definition of density)
  5. The Elemental World (A world without chemical reactions)
  6. Chemical Bonding (Chemical bonding and attraction—an intuitive approach to the definition of a chemical reaction)
  7. Properties of Elements (How the periodic table helps us to understand the elements and their reactions)
  8. Then What is a Metal? (Properties of metals)
  9. Molecular Weight (The mass of a molecule is equal to the sum of the mass of its atoms—an intuitive illustration)
  10. How Can I Get a Reaction? (How the periodic table can be used to predict a reaction)
  11. Reactions Between Compounds (A second kind of chemical reaction)
  12. Atomic Gangs (Groups of atoms that act like a separate element)
  13. Why Do We Care About Chemical Reactions Anyway? (A reminder of the practical importance of these studies)
  14. Carbon Chemistry (A simple introduction—definition and description—to the broad field of organic chemistry)
  15. Fueling Reactions (A description of how energy is derived from the breaking of chemical bonds, and info about where different fuels come from)
  16. People Chemistry (How people get their energy from chemicals)
  17. More People Chemistry (More about how food is used for energy)
  18. The Molecules of Life: Nucleic Acids (Introducing the basic molecules that make up living things beginning with the genetic code)
  19. The Molecules of Life: Proteins
  20. The Molecules of Life: Polysaccharides
  21. The Molecules of Life: Lipids and Others
  22. Solutions (Introducing water chemistry with emphasis on its interactions with solid chemicals)
  23. Solubility (Understanding what will or will not dissolve in what)
  24. Suspensions (Undissolved solid in liquid)
  25. The Pain of Suspensions (Discovering the practical problems that may be caused by suspensions)
  26. Water as a Protector of Life (The chemical design of this most important molecule and how it allows life to exist)
  27. Saved by Water (The ways water protects us from the harshness of the universe’s physical environment)
  28. Acids and Bases (What are acids and bases?)
  29. Don’t Say pHooey (A simple introduction to the measure of acidity and basicity called pH)
  30. Thermo-dy-whatchacall-your-namics (Why some reactions take place and others do not)
  31. Heat-Producing and Heat-Robbing Reactions (What reactions do to the energy balance of their surroundings)
  32. Kinetics (How fast will a particular reaction take place?)

Biology—The Study of Life and Living Things.

  1. So What’s Life? (Defining life and placing science in perspective with the Christian religion)
  2. Organization in Living Things
  3. It’s a What-cha-ma-callit (Naming living organisms)
  4. Cells (The basic unit of scientific "life")
  5. Cell Accessories (Differences among cells of different organisms)
  6. The Great Debate (An overview of the debate on the origin of life: the evolutionary bias)
  7. Bang? (Christian perspective on the origin of the universe)
  8. Abiogenesis (Christian perspective on the origin of life; based on our knowledge of physics and chemistry, the unlikelihood of life arising from non-life by purely physical processes)
  9. Making You Out of Apes? (Christian perspective on the origin of humans)
  10. Adaptive Evolution (What has been observed that may rightly be called "evolution")
  11. The World of Microbes (A survey of living things beginning with the simplest organisms)
  12. Botany (Plants)
  13. The Tiny Plants
  14. Up the Plant Ladder
  15. Higher Plants—Non-Flowering Plants
  16. Higher Plants—Flowering Plants
  17. The Animals
  18. Phyla of the "Changed Animals" (Animals of increasing complexity)
  19. Does Your Body Have Cavities?
  20. You’re Nowhere Without Joints in Your Legs!
  21. Mandibulates
  22. You’d Walk Slowly Too if You Had Tube Feet
  23. Fishlike Animals with Cords
  24. Slimy or Not, Mom Still Despises You
  25. Up, Up and Away
  26. You Big Hairy Animal!
  27. Miscellaneous Little Fuzzy Things
  28. Was Jonah Swallowed by a Mammal?
  29. I Wouldn’t Say You’re a Dog, But You’re Still Ugly!
  30. You and Me, Baby
  31. Them Bones, Them Bones (A survey of the human systems beginning with the skeletal system)
  32. Muscles
  33. Digestive System
  34. Respiratory System
  35. The Urinary System
  36. The Race for the Egg (Fertilization)
  37. Circulatory, Lymphatic and Immune Systems
  38. You Are a Bundle of Nerves (The nervous system)
  39. Genetics
  40. Ecology (Interactions among organisms and their environments)
  41. Food Web
  42. Can We Get Along?
  43. Population Dynamics

Applications of the Rainbow

  1. Scientific Method (Introduction to theory, hypothesis, testing, controls, objectivity and conclusions)
  2. The Earth (Composition and characteristics of our planet)
  3. Earth Tantrums (Earthquakes and volcanoes)
  4. Collections of Water (How bodies of water form and remain)
  5. Big Collections of Water (The world’s ocean)
  6. The Greenhouse Effect (Protection we receive from our atmosphere)
  7. Geology (The science of the earth’s composition; a Christian perspective on the age of the earth: seeing versus assuming)
  8. How to Make Soil (Erosion and the weathering of rock)
  9. Water in the Soil (Ground water)
  10. Atmospheric Science (Description of the various zones of our atmosphere)
  11. Meteorology and Climatology (The difference between weather and climate)
  12. Stirring the Atmospheric Pot (The first of several lessons on how the physical forces act on the world’s matter to give us climate and control our weather)
  13. Bringing Order to Mixed Fluid
  14. Atmospheric Currents
  15. What the Currents Do to Climate
  16. The Ever-Changing Weather
  17. Clouding the Issue (Know your clouds)
  18. Leaving Earth—Our Solar System (The planets and their characteristics)
  19. Sun and Earth (The earth’s motions in relationship to the sun and its effects on the seasons)
  20. Far Away From Home (Outer space and the universe)
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