Homeschooling: Taking a Risk

I took a step out of my normal planning process and am leaping us into a whole new curriculum next year with the exception of our math program -it just works too well to change up right now.

My philosophy concerning teaching is to find something educationally sound, affordable for our budget (which is minimal), and something I can use or tweak to fit our needs and learning styles.  If my kids love it, I like to stick with it because if learning is fun...learning happens easily!  We enjoyed our curriculum this year, even my daughter who drags her feet in Language Arts has learned to enjoy her lessons.  I was hesitant to even consider changing curriculums, but felt I needed to at least make a fair comparison rather than blindly committing to a plan financially.

As I looked at next year, I knew I needed something that would enable my girls to be more independent in their work.  Our new baby is going to add a lot of interruptions in addition to having a non-napping preschooler in the mix.  At first I planned to stick with Easy Peasy allinonehomeschool.com for History and Science, as well as our Saxon Math program.  I was only looking at potentially changing up our Language Arts because it is time consuming and though our math program also is time consuming, I don't want to change it because we are learning so well with it.

My two contenders were The Good & The Beautiful (non-denomination Christian, written by Mormons) or Masterbooks (solidly bible based)...they are very different programs, yet they both teach the same educational concepts.  Initially I didn't want to switch because my girls were enjoying their curriculum, but the way that Masterbooks weaves the bible throughout everything, I couldn't tear myself away from the potential gift that would give them in these all-important years of learning.  I prayed over the decision many times and couldn't escape that draw to the biblical foundations provided in Masterbooks.

After much back and forth comparison, I not only decided to switch to Masterbooks for Language Arts, but also for History and Science.  Never before have I seen a program that takes the topic of the Periodic Table and provides biblical foundations and lessons tied to each and every element!  It is simply amazing and I can't wait to dig into these lessons with my girls!  I really hope they love it too.