After months of hard work we have completed our set of openly licensed books: ‘Grade 4-6 Natural Sciences and Technology with the Thunderbolt Kids’, according to the latest CAPS statement released in September for the 2013 school year. They are structured as a combined textbook and workbook with a graphical storybook companion. The textbook-workbook comes in two volumes per grade, part A for term 1 & 2 and part B for term 3 & 4 and they have supporting teachers guides and Afrikaans versions too.

The books have been completed, laid out, translated and shared with the Department of Basic Education (DBE). The books are going through the official channels for endorsement, but they have not yet been endorsed. We hope to have a positive response from them soon i.e. that they will endorse the books and make use of the freedom of the open copyright license to print them. We will only know this once an official statement has been made by DBE, but at this stage even though the books are CAPS aligned, they are not yet DBE endorsed.

Free and open digital copies
These books have been released under an open copyright license which grants educators the freedom to copy and distribute them freely. You are welcome to use them in their digital version for free. They also have accompanying teachers guides and graphical storybook companions under the same open copyright licence.

Samples and free digital books
Below are links to samples of the content of the English learners’ books, and a Science Adventures companion for Grade 4. Please note that these are still in draft format, and the workbook samples are not the print quality versions (the images will look grainy). The actual high resolution PDF files are all well over 100 MB in size because of all the images. We’re working on optimizing the size without losing print quality.

The final digital files for use will be released in the next week, with a link posted for you to download them. You can view the sample versions here:

Grade 4-6 Natural Sciences and Technology (CAPS) English learners’ books: 

• Grade 4A (CAPS) English (Term 1 and 2) –  http://goo.gl/8Vsan
• Grade 4B (CAPS) English (Term 3 and 4) – http://goo.gl/o6IfU
• Grade 5A (CAPS) English (Term1 and 2) – http://goo.gl/MHJG7
• Grade 5B (CAPS) English (Term 3 and 4) – http://goo.gl/mx4oR
• Grade 6A (CAPS) English (Term1 and 2) – http://goo.gl/pq7tx
• Grade 6B (CAPS) English (Term 3 and 4) – http://goo.gl/Ukn05

Science adventures companion books: 

• Grade 4 Science Adventures – http://goo.gl/cgCj8

Ordering copies of the workbooks
We request that government schools wait until we hear if DBE will be printing them. Independent schools who do not get the regular workbooks from the DBE are welcome to add their print order to the print-run we are organising for the private schools. Anybody is free to print the files for themselves, but the greater the combined print-run is, the lower average price everybody can get.

We are doing a combined print run for a number of schools and expect the prices to be:

• R95 per volume – thus R190 per learner for the two volumes of +-220 pages each.
• The optional companion science adventures storybooks are also R95 per volume.

 

To place an order for printed copies and to participate in the print-run please e-mail:

•  (<carine at siyavula dot com>) or call us on 021 469 4749.

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