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!