As a homeschool mom, I am always looking for great books to help support and encourage me in all that I do. Awaking Wonder: Opening Your Child’s Heart to the Beauty of Learning by Sally Clarkson is one of those books that I knew I needed.

Awakening Wonder is a hardcover book with just over 200 pages. Within those 200 pages, 12 chapters take us from A Wonderful Beginning to Never-Ending Wonder for Lifelong Learning.

After reading the book, I looked back and realized this poor book is now beaten up, full of underlined phrases and dog-eared pages. There is so much to learn from this book for new homeschool moms or a veteran like myself.

I spent a fair amount of time reading and taking in all that Sally had to share through this book. Some chapters were more challenging for me to read, as I have already been there and done that, but others are so full of information that was still useful for me to use and implement in our homeschool days.

Not only is there useful information for my homeschool in Awakening Wonder, but there are tips and information for mom, dad, and just around the house also. The main point of this book is to keep God at the center of your home. Sally also reminds us that play is an essential part of learning. I love the reminder of this simple thing.

One thing I took away from Awakening Wonder is I should not strive to spoon-feed my children information. I should help develop them into treasure seekers, letting them research and find information for themselves. Allowing my children to explore while I help them is a great way to establish lifelong wonder-filled learning.

Another piece of information that I took away from this was to read aloud. I already knew that but hearing it again from another source was a great encouragement. I love how Sally recommends reading aloud for many subjects and how math and language arts were the only primary textbooks they used for much of their homeschool days. This made me think about how much “stuff” I was filling our days. We could be reading and doing versus staring at textbooks.

Awakening Wonder ends with a list of 6 foundational ideas. The list provides an excellent summary of everything in the book and an encouragement for the homeschool parent. The foundational ideas and the comment that we do not need to check all the boxes public school checks encourage me to focus on the wonder and see what my children love to learn and engage them.

Awakening Wonder has given me a fresh breath of encouragement for my homeschool. I feel that every homeschool parent needs to own, or at least read this book at least once, if not many more times.

-Product review by Amanda Hopkins, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, February 2021