Course pack FAQ.

No. A course pack is built to be run by the adult in the room — a parent at the kitchen table or a certified guide in a co-op. The pack lays out each week, tells you what to do at the bench, and gives you the rubric that says what “good” looks like, so you’re never guessing. If you want the full picture first, read Is this for you?

A complete, ready-to-run course: a week-by-week plan built around hands-on lab work, the mastery rubrics and demonstrations that show real understanding, a study system, an AI-use guide, and a shopping list for gear. It is not a video course your student watches alone, not an online class with a teacher on the other end, and not a subscription. It’s the course and the method, in one place. Want to see the actual materials? Look inside the Biology pack.

Grades 6–12, tuned to AP-level rigor. A motivated middle-schooler and a college-bound junior can use the same pack; what changes is how far and how fast they push. Because it’s mastery-based, each student advances when the work is right rather than on a fixed calendar.

Biology. It’s the fully built-out course the others are modeled on, so it’s the best place to see the method in full. Start at the Biology pack or take the look-inside tour.

The course runs on a two-day rhythm — a bench day for hands-on work and a build day to process it — at roughly two hours a day, across about 32 weeks for a full year. Because it’s mastery-paced, a student who needs longer on a unit takes it. The full sequence is on the course map.

When a transcript, application, or eligibility form needs an A–F, you produce one — derived from the mastery record, never averaged from points. We walk through exactly how, with a conversion table and a worked example, in Turning mastery into a letter grade. Keep the underlying rubric record as your documentation; it’s stronger evidence than a bare letter.

Mastery is decided at a live demonstration — the student does the work and defends it out loud while an adult asks unscripted follow-ups. A chatbot can’t stand in for that, which is also why we’re relaxed about AI as a study partner. The design is explained in AI-proof by design, and the honest-use rules are in each pack’s AI-use guide.

Each pack includes a vendor & equipment reference that names exactly what its labs need and roughly what it costs. The spend splits into durable gear you buy once and reuse all year (and often across subjects) — a microscope, glassware, goggles — and perishable supplies like specimens and reagents that you order as each unit comes up. Buying in a consolidated order or two keeps shipping down.

Yes, with sensible setup and an attentive adult. The chemistry is calibrated to a home bench, and every lab has a pre-lab checklist that names its hazards, gear, and cleanup. We put the whole picture — bench setup, chemicals, sharps and dissection, eye protection, younger children and pets, and disposal — in one place: Home-lab safety.

Not necessarily. The mastery standard cares that a student can reason about anatomy — not that a particular specimen was cut in your kitchen. If dissection isn’t right for your home or your student isn’t ready, talk to your guide about an approved substitute or a supervised dissection elsewhere. See the notes in Home-lab safety, and the Dissections pack for the skill on its own terms.

Yes. With a good internet connection and a willing adult in the room, the same course runs from a home bench, with the live defense held over video. It’s not a “virtual classroom” — the lab stays hands-on at home; only the defense moves online. The roles, weekly cadence, tech, and materials are laid out in the remote home-lab track.

Yes. A family runs it at its own pace; a guide running several students gets the scheduling and instructor pieces in the same pack — including multi-section scheduling and the instructor toolkit. The course is the same; only the person holding the clipboard changes.

Yes. Every rubric, checklist, and guide has a print-ready packet version formatted for 8.5×11 paper and a three-ring binder. For Biology we’ve put them in binder order on one page: Assemble the Biology binder. You build the student’s binder from the pack itself — there’s nothing extra to buy to hold it in your hands.

Absolutely — no sign-up needed. The look-inside tour shows a real week, a real rubric, a real lab-notebook page, and a real demonstration, each linked to the full artifact. The whole Biology pack is open to read.

The packs are still being rolled out, so we’re working directly with the first families and guides rather than posting a price. If you’d like to use a pack, want to know the cost, or just have a question about fit, email us a sentence or two about your student and what you’re hoping to do, and a real person will answer.

Leslie is the methodology behind the packs. She is an Anatomy & Physiology instructor and the A&P Laboratory Coordinator at Boise State University — the person who designs the labs 1,000+ students run each term. She taught biology in Idaho public middle and high schools, is an Idaho-certified science teacher (grades 6–12) and an Idaho Master Naturalist, and has led a homeschool science co-op for 22 years. The packs put that two-decade, lab-led method in your hands. More in About Leslie.