Course Overview

Solid science – Awakening Wonder: Physical Science presents students with an overview of the physical sciences, focusing on concepts that are consistent with contemporary scientific thought. We have chosen materials and activities that present sound scientific knowledge in a fun and interesting way so that in addition to a strong foundation in the physical sciences, students will come away with a profound curiosity and delight in the scientific principles they have learned and a desire to become participants in the ongoing adventure that is science. This course focuses on matter, energy, chemical and physical change, light, sound electricity, magnetism and more. For a more complete list of subjects covered please see the Topic Overview page in the samples section.

Relevant Laboratory Activities – Lab activities can be one of the biggest challenges in teaching science at home. Too often the lab activities described in textbooks require larger groups of students, expensive equipment, or materials that are difficult to obtain. More time can be spent trying to pull the materials together than it takes to perform the actual activity.

Awakening Wonder: Physical Science utilizes the Elements of Science kit from Thames and Kosmos to help students engage in fun and educational hands-on laboratory experiences at least once each week. We have carefully correlated the activities in Elements of Science with the reading assignments so that the hands-on activities will relate to the topics your student has been reading about that week. This excellent kit contains nearly everything you'll need (except for a few easily obtained household items) so you won't be hunting desperately all over town for some obscure item, and the booklet contained with the kit includes clear instructions as well as an explanation for what is happening in each experiment and why.

Some topics covered in the course have no corresponding activity in the Elements of Science kit. For these topics, laboratory activities have been selected from one of the books used in the course. The materials for these courses are included in the Master Materials List (see samples section) and the course guide includes additional information and some student pages for these activities.

In addition to the scheduled activities, the flexibility of the course schedule allows time for your student to engage in additional, personal, hands-on exploration. Both the Science Explorer: Physical Science textbook and The Way Science Works contain instructions for numerous additional high-quality activities your student may wish to try, or your student may wish to think of a lab experiment of his or her own.

Science in context – The Awakening Wonder: Physical Science course incorporates biographies of respected scientists who have made major contributions in the physical sciences. We believe that reading about the lives of these scientists will help students view science in the context of real explorations by real people during the course of real history. We hope that seeing the story of science in this context will help students see that science is something they can personally be a part of and feel a desire to get involved in the ongoing adventure.

Internet activities – Prentice Hall maintains an excellent companion website for Science Explorer: Physical Science, including interactive demonstrations, links to additional information, games and puzzles, online quizzes and assessments, and so forth. These activities are included in the Awakening Wonder: Physical Science schedule to give students practice with online learning.

Flexible schedule – A typical school year generally consists of 180 days, often scheduled as 36 weeks, 5 days per week. The Awakening Wonder: Physical Science course is scheduled for 34 weeks, 4 days per week. This provides the flexibility of one day per week and two weeks during the course of the year in which a student will have time to engage in additional hands-on laboratory activities, research topics of personal interest, go on field trips, create a science fair project or other long-term laboratory activity, or just complete work not finished earlier in the week and adapt to those unforeseen circumstances that always seem to interfere with the best-laid plans.

Easy to implement – We know you have other things going on in your life besides teaching science so we have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to guide your student through this adventure in physical science. All of the assignments for a week are laid out on a grid on a single page, along with a list of all materials that will be needed for the lab activities which are not included in the kit. The course guide also includes reproducible notebook pages that your student can use to create an informative, attractive student notebook, recording his or her explorations in the world of physical science. Suggestions for what to include in the notebook are given in the course guide.