F.A.Q.

Why can't I purchase a package with all the books and materials I need for Awakening Wonder: Physical Science?

That would be GREAT, wouldn't it? This is something we're considering for the future if there is enough interest in Awakening Wonder products to justify the expense and hassle of getting set up as a reseller. You can help us down this road by telling all your friends how much you love Awakening Wonder.

What about life science and earth science? What about materials for high school or elementary aged students?

We plan on adding to our product offerings as quickly as we can, but since we are a busy homeschooling family ourselves it is sometimes hard to predict how soon we will be able to complete a product. Since we use these materials with our own family, new products will probably become available about once a year.

Should I purchase a Science Explorer teacher edition, workbook, or lab manual from Prentice Hall?

Only if you want to. None of these are necessary to complete the Awakening Wonder course. The Awakening Wonder: Physical Science course guide assumes that you will be discussing the concepts in the reading material with your student, as well as reviewing your student's notebook entries and observing laboratory activities. The online self-tests and self-assessments provided by Prentice Hall on the companion web site for the Science Explorer textbook also offer an opportunity for assessment and grading. This being the case, the course guide does not address the review questions or practice test questions found in the textbook, and no answers for these questions are included in the Awakening Wonder materials. The questions do provide excellent material for discussing the concepts being covered with your student, and the answers are usually easy to find within the text itself. However, if you desire to have the answers to these questions easily at hand, you may wish to purchase the teacher edition of the textbook from Prentice Hall.

If your student learns better with a workbook than working in a less structured notebook format, you may find it worthwhile to purchase the inexpensive companion workbook from Prentice Hall. Just assign the workbook pages that correspond with the textbook pages assigned on the schedule each week.

The activities in the lab manual from Prentice Hall are mostly geared toward groups of students working in a school laboratory environment. We believe that using the Elements of Science kit from Thames and Kosmos is more practical in the home setting and actually provides more hands-on experiences, with a greater level of success and enthusiasm, than you would have if you tried to adapt the classroom activities in the lab manual for use in your home. We have not included the activities from the lab manual in the Awakening Wonder schedules or materials lists. We do encourage you, though, to use some of the activities in the Science Explorer: Physical Science textbook and/or The Way Science Works as supplements to help your student delve deeper into an area of interest.

Who is Lulu and why do I care?

Lulu.com is the print on demand publishing service we use to produce our Awakening Wonder products and ship them to you. Clicking on the appropriate link on the Buy Now page of this web site you will be taken to our Lulu.com storefront page. When you place your order, your book is printed in a timely manner and shipped directly from Lulu.com to you. We believe that using Lulu.com is the best way, especially while our business is till in its infant stages, to provide you with the high quality products and services that are important to us and to you. As a busy homeschooling family with "special needs", we would probably not be able to offer our products at all, at this time, without the services of Lulu.com. Their print on demand and shipping services greatly simplify inventory management and the piles of paperwork involved in operating a small business. Lulu.com is also available for customer service if there is a problem with your order, a service we would not currently be able to provide due to the other demands on our time. We are confident that your experience ordering our materials through Lulu.com will be a positive one.

What worldview is represented in Awakening Wonder products?

This is a common question when researching homeschool curriculum materials, and as homeschoolers ourselves, we recognize the importance of this question. The short answer in the case of Awakening Wonder materials is that we have selected secular books and kits for our studies of science. If you are seeking a program with a strong, explicit religious component, this is probably not the program for you.

That said, I would also like to state plainly that our faith in Christ is of utmost importance to our family and is central to everything we do. Like you, we are careful in choosing the resources we use to educate our children.

We believe that faith and scientific inquiry are two distinct methods of learning about the world around us. Although both faith and science are both valuable tools in the quest for truth, they are different disciplines that use different methodologies, focus on different kinds of knowledge, and have different kinds of limitations and opportunities for error. We prefer to study science and faith as separate disciplines and then discuss the areas where they overlap and where they differ with our children ourselves.

We do not believe that textbook authors and curriculum publishers have the authority to interpret scripture for our family—or yours. We firmly believe that religious instruction and faith-related learning are the responsibility of the family and church. We feel that there is too much that God has not yet chosen to reveal to man, and too much that science has not yet discovered, to responsibly merge the two disciplines into a single subject of academic study. The resulting product too often is a combination of weak faith and shaky science that distorts both disciplines. Scientific corroboration is not necessary to have faith, nor is divine revelation required for scientific observation. We do feel it is critical that our children understand the differences between divine revelation and scientific inquiry, and which knowledge has come to us through which channel.

Some homeschool science materials seek to blend science and faith in order to demonstrate God's hand in all things, or to ensure that faith is at the center of all things a family is learning. We believe that God's hand is evident in all things and we trust that parents will point it out as appropriate in their own families, according to the level of understanding, both spiritual and academic, of their own children.