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Investigate and discover the wonders of God's world with your children using Sonlight Science. Intriguing, full-color books feature wonders such as animals of the rainforest or the intricacies of a human cell captivate your children and make science come alive. You can pull all you need for an in-depth science adventure right from Sonlight's books.
Sonlight students cover more scientific subjects and more material—more often—before junior high school than many classroom school students receive even once before they get to high school!
Sonlight's homeschool science is not only thorough, but fun! Over the years, Sonlight students focus several times over on seven primary fields of study...
We provide lots of hands-on science experiments to serve as "hooks" for children to grasp new concepts and understand them on a deeper level. Children are more likely to remember ideas they actually experience, rather than facts they simply hear about.
We provide a Science Kit complete with the unusual materials you'll need for experiments, so you can save the time you would have spent gathering supplies to enjoy learning with your children instead.
You won’t have to hunt for three washers or a wintergreen mint at the last minute—or buy a pack of one hundred brass nails just to get the one you need to complete your science lesson for the day. Instead, you can simply open your science kit and fi nd exactly the tools you need at the time you need them (and in the right amount—we count carefully as we pack your kit for you).
For common household items that are easy to put your hands on with a little advance warning, we provide a list of needed items a week ahead of time, so you are well-prepared for any experiment you want to do.
Sonlight offers a ready-to-use, comprehensive Science Instructor's Guide to walk you through each day's lesson. Not only does this guide help you know where you are, where you've been and where you're going in the school year, you'll find handy notes to explain your Sonlight experiments and the concepts they address or theories they prove. You'll find a chart that lists the books you are using and which weeks they are used... for both four-and five-day schedules.
You'll also enjoy Sonlight's comprehension questions, vocabulary review, easy to-read answer keys, and innovative activity sheets.
Sonlight Science K-6 includes original illustrations to increase interest and to prompt your child's memory. We also produce kid-friendly, age-appropriate and engaging tools to enhance your child's adventure in learning science. These are not merely fill-in-the-blank worksheets, but true Activity Sheets with a variety of thought-provoking questions and activities.
As your students approach the same topics from many different angles, they can "play" with the concepts, expand on the experiments, and learn what's on the periphery as well as what's in the center of their educational program. They can absorb more deeply what they see, hear and experience.
This diverse but repetitive approach means you are under no pressure to ensure your children "get it right" the first time (i.e., the only time) they will hear a word or study a topic. For Sonlight students, the first time is merely the first time. There will be future opportunities to master unfamiliar material.
This approach to education—plenty of review, but from new and interesting directions—means you and your children can relax as you go about your studies.
By the time they have finished the high school materials we offer, we are confident they will have advanced further in their science education than 99 percent of their peers.
Not only are you likely to find Sonlight science challenging, you won’t find a science program that is more pleasurable. And that's the bottom line, isn't it: to instill in children a lifelong love to learn?
We are often amazed at what children learn through Sonlight Science. We believe you will find similar joy when you take the journey of discovery through the Sonlight Science curriculum.
Sonlight science programs are designed to work across wide age ranges. This allows you to make choices based on subject matter rather than age. It also allows you to combine students into a study group more easily. See the chart in this article for topics and age ranges.
This forum is for discussing the practical questions, issues and concerns you face as you implement — or consider implementing — the Science programs found in ALL levels of Sonlight Curriculum.
Each week's schedule sheet includes three detailed lists of the supplies you'll need: one showing what you'll get from our non-consumable supplies kit, another showing what you'll use from your course-specific supply kit, and a third showing what you'll need from your own home or kitchen.
Moreover, if we think something is easy enough to get, but isn't necessarily always on hand (for example, an egg carton), we also include prior-week warnings about the items to look for around your house and/or to shop for while you're out and about.
Over the years, various clients have told us that they found certain experiments difficult or impossible to do. We asked one of our employees, Dee Ann, to go through all of the science programs and try all of the experiments with which anyone had told us they had struggled... plus any others she thought looked difficult. We wanted her to figure out why they were difficult, why they weren't working, and if there were any means by which we could make the experience more pleasant.
She and her kids, she said, had a great time. "We did the experiments exactly as the book described. If it didn't work, we figured out why... and how to make it work."
You now get the benefit of their work. As a result, you will find additional instructions, warnings and/or commentaries on many experiments.
Dee Ann told us of one experiment that is designed to show that hot air expands. You place a coin on top of a bottle and heat the air inside. The picture in the book showed a coin completely lifting off the bottle. Well, that was significantly overdramatized. Instead, the air expansion produced a little 'burp' sound. The experiment worked. It proved the point. But it was far less dramatic than the book implied. I pointed that out in the Instructor's Guide notes.
Besides these notes throughout the guides, you will find several other features as well:
Mastering vocabulary and concepts is the largest task in learning any science. That's why our guides have long included vocabulary lists with definitions, and focusing questions and answers.
Now, in response to requests from a number of clients, we have significantly upgraded our Science Activity Sheets found in K-6. We have added original illustrations to increase interest and to prompt your child's memory. We have also produced kid-friendly, age-appropriate and engaging tools to enhance your child's adventure in learning science. These are not merely fill-in-the-blank worksheets, but true Activity Sheets with a variety of thought-provoking questions and activities.
The guides also include complete answer keys that mirror the student Activity Sheets.
Science Supplies KitsWe didn't want to leave you in the lurch, having to hunt around at the last minute for the bendable straws, soap-free steel wool, medium-sized steel washers, clay, and so forth that are required to do some of the science experiments.
We wanted to eliminate the futile hunts through the Yellow Pages — or the bazaar — looking for the shop that might sell you a ping pong ball or cork. And we wanted to do away with those frustrating excursions down to the hardware store for things like the 1" copper brad the instructions call for — but that the hardware store sells ( if it sells them!) only in boxes of a hundred.
That's why we created our science supply kits. They include all the small and unusual items you'll need: things you wouldn't normally have around the house and other items you might own but wouldn't be able, easily, to put your hands on.
After gathering all your supplies together, we place them in a handy, resealable, zip-lock bag so you'll always know where everything is when you need it.
As mentioned above, we had Dee Ann, our purchasing agent, do most of the experiments. Sometimes she discovered that the book's descriptions of the supplies you need are misleading or incorrect. As a result, she made the necessary changes.
Besides incorrect items, Dee Ann also paid attention to questions clients had raised about what, specifically, various kits include. For example, in the Intro to Biology supplies kit, we had long been including radish, lentil, popcorn, and wheat seeds. The problem was that not everyone who received those kits knew what was what. So Dee Ann rewrote the supply kit parts lists and descriptions so there could be no mistakes. She even added notes on the care and handling of certain components....
EXPERIMENTSBeginning at the kindergarten level and continuing right through the elementary years, we have chosen the wonderful Usborne books to do the bulk of the work of conveying scientific knowledge.
Reading an Usborne book is a unique experience. The best way we can describe it is to suggest that you imagine what it would be like to have a textbook that consisted almost solely of the kinds of illustrations you find in National Geographic, accompanied by the same kind of informative text you find alongside those illustrations — yet written in a manner that children can easily understand.
Usborne books' illustrations are beautifully detailed hand-drawn pictures and look as if they could have been adapted straight from National Geographic photographs.
Every page is filled with these high-quality, full-color pictures — either full, two-page spreads or many smaller illustrations on each page. All text is clearly tied to the illustrations.
These are books that your kindergartner will want to take with him to bed... and that you'll want to read for your own educational enjoyment. They aren't "baby" books. They're filled with solid information. And, in many of them, experiments that you and your children can do together.
Besides the Usborne books, you'll find we carry dozens of other science texts, all of which are designed for easy understanding and pleasurable education. These are books that — as almost everything else in Sonlight® — you and your children will turn to not because you have to but because you want to. Because you want to pursue the adventure.
DISCOVERY BOOKSIn every year's program we make sure we include dozens of hands-on science experiments. The scientific method consists not only of philosophical speculation, but testing, experimentation.
In the early years, the Usborne books provide many if not all of the experimental opportunities you will need.
From the 3rd through 7th years, however, we have incorporated the TOPS Science Learning System books which use cartoon-illustrated instructions and a minimum of low-cost materials to teach maximum scientific content.
TOPS lessons normally require students first to postulate what they think will happen and then to do an experiment (or set of experiments) to check their hypotheses. You will find either 20 or 36 lessons in each book. The lessons are simple to do but teach solid scientific concepts and vocabulary. These books are designed for parental involvement.
Through third grade, we expect that you will be doing the experiments right alongside your child. From fourth grade up, though we encourage you to participate if at all possible, you probably don't have to be present at all times while your children do their experiments.
The excitement builds! Enjoy the adventure.
