One of the marvels of having 8 children is seeing how each child is so different when it comes to learning. While my oldest son enjoys learning through books and the internet, my other children prefer a mixture of visual, audio, and hands-on learning styles. It is easy for me to want to slip back into the “easy” way out - which is to just hand every child a textbook and workbook and say “Go at it”. However, deep down inside, I know there are better ways to learn. Therefore, I try to keep our learning methods varied, for the sake of the children.

We enjoy using Charlotte Mason curriculum from Queen’s Homeschool Supplies because it brings in living stories, nature studies, copywork, and narration. (You can find these materials on our website, www.godseternalmasterpiece.com ) We absolutely love that method of learning. However, I don’t just stop there. Too much writing and copying tends to make a couple of my children bored stiff. Therefore, we incorporate other sensory-based activities into our learning as well.

When studying math, we do our math facts in sand, with paint, wrap up cards, learning palettes, educational games, etc.. Geography is much more fun when using a large map drawn out on a tablecloth so that the kids can actually jump from one country to another. We also like to draw out countries on the driveway with sidewalk chalk so that the kids can have more space to draw in details about each place. Stories from history can be mixed in with movies from that time period and audio CDs. Field trips to museums and visits with people who lived in that time period also make history come alive. Why just read about nature studies when you can actually go outside and study it? Gardening, collecting leaves, checking out trees, categorizing plants, viewing wildlife, following a trapper or hunter around, etc. are all great ways to learn about God’s creation. English is probably our hardest subject to do aside from workbooks and copywork. However, it is still possible. In the past our children have made homeschool newsletters, family history notebooks, story scrapbooks, and more. We also enjoy doing mad libs, which requires each child to put in different adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc in order for the hilarious story to be formed.

A few of my kids can race ahead in their studies while other children require longer amounts of time to finish their work. That’s OK too. I’d rather have the knowledge and wisdom engrained in their minds for life rather than having them put it into short term memory just for the moment. If that means taking a week to learn something rather than a day, then so be it! That’s the beauty of homeschooling!

Becky, God’s Eternal Masterpiece

The summer of 2011 went by too fast for our family! As we begin another homeschool year, we rejoice in all the memories made during the summer months. While we thoroughly enjoyed taking the bookstore around to various homeschool conferences in the midwest while meeting new friends, we were still relieved when we could actually slow down and just enjoy being at home with our own family. Many of the hot days of summer were spent harvesting the garden, watching the children swim in their pool, and renewing our weary souls. As we have discovered over the years, traveling and managing a bookstore tends to take away from the extra time we used to have just studying God’s Word. We have been convicted that as a family, we need to spend more time in our personal devotions and less time doing things that don’t truly count for eternity. To help in this endeavor, we are now using “Who is God?” by Apologia Curriculum. This apologetic curriculum is perfect for our family devotional time around the breakfast table. As we read about the various characteristics of God, our children work in the accompanying notebooking journal or coloring book which emphasizes scripture memorization and putting various doctrines into practice. (This material has great strengthened our children’s Christian worldview, so we are now offering it, along with volumes 2 & 3, in our bookstore at www.godseternalmasterpiece.com.)

We also worked on serving one another with love and humility. It comes easier for some of our children; however, it was a struggle for others. As each child assisted another sibling in picking berries, cleaning their bedroom, hanging laundry on the line, etc, we saw stronger sibling unity and a great love for one another being established. Even our one year old joined in by helping to pick the blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries while the older children were doing it. Of course, many of the berries ended up in his mouth - but that’s OK! It was a great source of Vitamin C!

Summer wrapped up with our vacation to the Iowa Regular Baptist Camp for Family Camp. What a joy to be refreshed physically and spiritually there! We all enjoyed the zip line, archery, swimming, boating, and reviving friendships with believers of like faith. Yes, there were loads of laundry to wash and overgrown weeds to pull when we came back home, but that’s OK! The memories made as a family were worth the work afterwards!

Now we are looking forward to what this new school year will bring us. It appears that the Lord has some new challenges for us in the days ahead, but we’ll tackle those as they come. It is so encouraging to know that God has promised never to leave us or forsake us!

Let us know how your summer went and what God’s been doing in your family! We can then rejoice together in all the amazing ways God works!

Becky, God’s Eternal Masterpiece, Mason City Iowa

Throughout the last 18 years of homeschooling, we are constantly changing and refining the way we do our learning and homeschooling.  I first began teaching my oldest son with textbooks and workbooks.  Over the years, however, we began doing less and less workbooks and many more hands-on projects and literature studies.  I began seeing that children learn more with “living books” and when they can see, hear, and touch what they are learning.  Each time I abolish another textbook and workbook, two things happen.  1 - My children cheer!  2 - We begin having much less stress in our homeschooling and much more joy in learning. 

I used to shun the Charlotte Mason style of learning, but over time, I find myself really appreciating her ideas about what a child’s education should consist of.  It makes a lot of sense and I find it working for almost all of my children.  (Please note that I said “most” of my children.  I have one child that would prefer the textbook/workbook style of learning.  However, the other 7 prefer learning through literature, hands-on projects, and real-life experiences.)  Let me introduce you to Charlotte Mason.  She was an educator in the 1800’s, in England, who had very strong ideas of what a child’s education should and should not look like.  She was appalled by how much time was wasted with busywork.  Charlotte believed that learning should be exciting and should cause the child to naturally love learning.  Work should be able to be done in a relatively short amount of time. 

Much of the learning can be done through the reading of living books, art and nature appreciation,  copywork, dictation, notebooking, and narration.  I will admit - I balked at first at the idea that one doesn’t need textbooks and workbooks to teach a child.  However, during the last few years, I have seen our children learn much more as we slowly incorpoate Charlotte’s learning methods.  I’ll try to show you how we use the various methods in our home.

Copywork:  Copywork is not the practice of one’s handwriting.  Instead, it involves copying whatever you place before the child so that every detail in capitalization, grammar, punctuation, and spelling is correct.  This can be done using copywork books (sold in our store), language lessons, or with your own pieces of literature.  In our home, we use this particularly while working on our language arts workbook.  We absolutely love Language Lessons by Sandi Queen (sold separately in our bookstore, www.godseternalmasterpiece.com).  The lessons are short and only take 10-15 minutes to do.  The children practice copying various words, sentences, poems, speeches, etc.  After they believe they’ve perfectly copied their assignment, they bring it to me to check.  If there is even one error, they have to do it again.  It only takes a day or two, and the kids make absolutely sure the work is correct before they bring it to me!  Capitalization, punctuation, and grammar rules are memorized quickly, in a natural way, as a result of copywork.  Most of my kids also learn correct spelling as a result, also.  However, I will say that I have one child that does not learn spelling well from copywork.  He still needs to be reminded of the phonetical and spelling rules.  Therefore, I use “The Natural Speller” with him (also sold in our God’s Eternal Masterpiece bookstore).  It is for grades 1-12 and reinforces all the spelling rules as he moves from grade to grade.  We also use copywork for math facts.  Instead of just using boring flash cards and drilling the kids non-stop, we let them copy the math facts.  That way it’s drilled into their heads while they are copying the facts.  They learn the correct answers quite easily, it seems.

Living Books:  Living books are books that bring any subject, character, and time period to life.  Historical fiction, great biographies, many of the character-building books from the early 1900’s, and more can be included.   Many of our favorite living books include Lamplighter Publishing books, historical books by Emma Leslie, Jotham’s Journey (and the other books in the series), and The Testimony of Charlie Coulson.  (These books are all available on our website, www.godseternalmasterpiece.com).  Kids can learn facts from a textbook, but they quickly forget them.  Read a well-written book from the time period you are studying, and the facts and characters come alive, thus sticking in a child’s memory forever.  When we are reading a great book, many times our kids will run to the internet to look up even more information about that subject.  They will also ask to do crafts or field trips based on what they’ve learned from the literature.  Their love for learning has been fanned by spending time reading a good book with mom!  I enjoy the fact that I can teach children of all ages can learn from the same book I’m reading to them.  I don’t have to be stressed out trying to teach each grade level textbook to each child separately this way.  No advance preparation is needed on my part. 

Narration: Narration is simply having the child tell what he or she has learned.  A child enjoys this much more than filling out blanks in a workbook just so that mom can know what he has comprehended.  It’s so simple to do.  In our home, after reading a chapter of a book, I’ll simply ask who can tell me what they enjoyed about the book.  I also might send a younger child to a teenager to tell them what the book was about.  The little ones love to go on and on about every little detail of the book.  A favorite is when daddy comes home from work.  The kids love to run to daddy to tell them about what they learned in school that day.  Daddy gets to be included in the day, that way, and the kids are reiterating the knowledge they’ve gained from good books.  Sometimes, daddy will ask more questions, which gets them thinking and analyzing even more. 

Dictation:  Dictation is the toughest for the kids, but still workable since it’s done in short spurts.  I usually use it basically for my high school kids.  Instead of copying various pieces of speeches, poems, etc., I read it to the child.  They write it down and pay close attention to the various rules of grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc.   This helps the teens to become exact in their writing skills.

Notebooking:  Notebooking looks different to different people.  My high school daughter, Janette, learns best when she is putting everything she learns into a scrapbook form.  She loves using Apologia science and the corresponding notebooks for that very reason.  Reports or small paragraphs are written and placed in a fun way into a colorful scrapbook/notebook.  Extra features are added to make it a keepsake.  My older elementary children enjoy making simple notebooks with facts, maps, and pictures while I am reading science or historical novels to them.  It keeps their hands busy while they are listening and assimilating what I’m reading to them.  Our preschoolers like making simple books out of colored paper with stickers and markers.  They draw pictures of what they hear us reading about.  As they explain their pictures to us, I’m always amazed at what all they’ve picked up on.  Notebooks and journals are also used when we go on nature hikes in our woods or in state parks.  The kids find all sorts of interesting clues about various plants or animals which they then write about or draw.  When they get home, they pull out the nature books so they can add extra bits of facts to each notebook page.  (Nature hikes are also great for collecting rocks, leaves and flowers (for pressing and identifying), etc.) 

I hope you’ve gotten a glimpse what our homeschool looks like now.  We do still use some textbooks - like for math.  However, even in math - I’m learning to do things with a more laid-back approach.  We’ll discuss that another time.  If you yearn to enjoy homeschooling more, I urge you to consider looking at the literature approach, the unit-study approach, or the Charlotte Mason approach to learn instead of using just textbooks and workbooks like the government schools do.  You might be surprised at how enjoyable learning truly can be!

Becky - God’s Eternal Masterpiece 

Many of you have asked how we homeschool and what material we use and recommend.  First of all, please understand that what we use is great for us, but may not work at all for your family.  I am a firm believer in the fact that every child learns differently and needs to have his education tailored to his needs and his learning style.  What works for one of my kids, may not work for another.  We do not use the same publishers and curricula for every child.  Having said that, I can tell you what has worked best for us and what hasn’t.  Since it can get to be a rather lengthy discussion, I plan to break it up into sections.

Although my oldest child was an analytical child who learned anything he read in a textbook almost immediately, I soon learned in his early childhood years that doing textbooks and workbooks for every subject was boring and dry.  Children learn best when touching, hearing, and seeing the material being presented to them.  I did use Bob Jones material for Kindergarten since I love their method of teaching phonics and reading.  I also use their reading program in 1st grade so that my kids have a strong foundation in proper phonics, grammar, and spelling.  However, after that we branched out.  Because I had only a few kids when I began homeschooling our oldest children, we began using KONOS, which emphasizes unit studies, literature, and hands-on projects.  Our children absolutely loved studying the medieval days, horses, insects, the Civil War, and much more as godly character traits were taught to them on a day-to-day basis.  To this day, we love KONOS, but do it only for short studies since I don’t have near the time needed to prepare all the hands-on projects that correlate with the lessons. 

When God began blessing us with more children, we moved more to a classical education which involves reading LOTS of living books as a family.  What are living books?  I’m glad you asked!!  Living books are books which make history, science, etc. come alive for the child.  We find that many of the older books and classical books do a better job of that than do many of the more modern stories.  The older books also teach godly character, proper grammar, and respect for authority.  We’ll get into specific authors and recommendations at a later time.  We began thinking outside of the box and we quit doing everything just like the government school did it when we were growing up.  Instead, we began doing many more studies outdoors in nature, field trips, interviewing various people in various occupations, ministering as a family in the community, and playing educational games.  As we planted the garden, we studied the ant houses, the various parts of the plant, how to identify the various tree leaves and weeds, how to identify the various classifications of animals/insects/birds, animal tracks, various ecosystems, and the list goes on and on.  The children loved this much more than just reading textbooks and doing workbooks.  I also discovered that they were learning much more this way.  In fact, their basic skills tests proved it when they began showing scores in the 97-99 percentile for the nation. 

We still do textbooks for math, spelling, and some English - but much of the other learning comes through the other methods I mentioned above.  I also quickly learned that the younger children learn what the older children are learning just by being in the same room with them, so I moved to teaching the younger ones the same material.  That saved on time and the older children enjoyed mentoring the younger children on what was being taught to them.  I began seeing the benefits of the one-room schoolhouse style of learning!

Anyway, we’ll stop there for now.  Next time, I’ll get into more specifics of what we use for homeschooling.  May the Lord richly bless you as you raise and educate your children for Him!

Becky, God’s Eternal Masterpiece

Visit us at www.godseternalmasterpiece.com for many more recommendations on godly homeschool curriculum, books, and materials!