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Who We Are and Why We're Here Aquinas Homeschool Books was created by me, Carla Hanson in 1998, with the moral support of my husband and 5 children. I created this site because I believe that there is a need for a discount bookstore where homeschooling families can find a wide variety of excellent educational resources that are in accord with Catholic doctrine. That does not mean, however, that I have limited the selection to books by Catholic authors. There is too much to be gained from the wisdom of so many authors, like Charlotte Mason and Mary Hood in addition to the great wisdom of Catholic authors such as Laura Berquist and Kimberly Hahn.  After all, anything that is true and good and beautiful belongs by right to the bride of Christ, the Church, and where the authors' ideas differ crucially from the Magisterial Teachings, I shall endeavor to point out the differences. In the few short years since I created this site, a vast quantity of resources have come to exist. The problem, especially for new homeschoolers, now has less to do with finding a good math program, or art program, or history book. From what I've seen, the problem now has much more to do with the difficulties of deciding from among the many good resources that exist. Therefore, my goal is to include only excellent resources and, along with it, such advice as I feel competent to give. The more I learn, the more I realize I do not know, and what works with one child may not work with another. I come, then, not as an expert, but as a fellow homeschooler who has found what works for one child and always seeks enthusiastically to find a book or a method or a set of manipulatives or even a toy that helps fulfill the goal of an excellent education. What is that goal, you may ask?  Rightly so, since that question has colored my choices in both books and viewpoint.  I believe that the goal of education is to learn what is true and good and beautiful. Most directly, this means learning to know, love, and serve God (theology). Indirectly, this also means learning about God's creation--both the natural world (math and science), and His masterpiece, which is man (history, literature, poetry, philosophy, music, art, and language). Moreover, in order to understand and utilize these gifts of God's creation, education must include the ability to write well, to speak well, to figure well, and to think logically such that one moves easily and accurately from facts to conclusion, and thereby chooses freely that which is true, good, and beautiful which, in the end, means nothing more and nothing less than choosing to know, love, and serve God. The difficult part is to master all of the above and still love learning in the end. A child who loves to learn does so with joy and ease. A child for whom learning is drudgery will seek to cease such activity as soon as possible, which is contrary to every goal above, especially since the goals and the means to the goals stated above do not end at age 18 or 22, but continue to grow throughout one's life. As parents, you are in the best position to find the proper balance between helping a child learn what he should learn, and helping him to retain the love of learning which seems natural to a young child. As Yeats wrote, "Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a bucket." For more information on finding that balance, please look in the Articles section and the How to Homeschool section of the bookstore. May God bless you in this worthy endeavor. The road is hard, but the fruits are tremendous.

How to Order Books In order to provide you with great discounts, we sell our books through Amazon.com, which means that most books are discounted by 10 to 30%. In order for Aquinas to get proper credit for your purchases, we ask that you do the following: 1. As soon as you click on a book link, please put it in your shopping cart on the Amazon site. You can always remove any item from your shopping cart if you change your mind. 2. If you want to continue shopping after you've selected a book, please use the Back button on your browser to return here so that each subsequent book comes from Aquinas as well. 3. The items in your shopping cart will remain there until you've made your final selections, at which point you can check out.