You want to bring your kids’ homeschool education to life and
have a happy, thriving home. But how?
The house, the meals, the shopping, your church activities, your work… You might even feel like this reader:
“It’s just too much. I feel like I’m not doing a good job at anything. My house is always a wreck, I’m behind with everything, the kids are bored and are fighting me about school. I feel like I’m constantly being interrupted and mad at them all the time. This is not how I pictured homeschooling!”
I’m Dana, and I believe you can bring your kids’ homeschool education to life and have a happy, thriving home.
When I started homeschooling, I was …overwhelmed. I admit it. I didn’t know how hard it would be to teach my kids. (And run the household, volunteer at church, and work part-time…) I felt ill-equipped. Like I was going to ruin my kids or at least scuttle their chances of getting into college.
Then through that first year, I realized that home educating my children was just an outgrowth of loving my kids and of Christ-centered mentoring and discipleship that we were already doing.
I knew I felt inadequate because I’d never done this before. Although I was becoming friends with another homeschool mom, every family is different, and she had her own family to teach. I would figure this out; I just didn’t know how it all would work YET.
As I worked through the first few years of home-educating my kids, it became evident that I had to cut down on my outside-the-home activities and learn better daily habits to make the most of my time and energy. I also needed to teach those habits to my kids to keep our family life running smoothly.
Slowly but with certainty, I grew in my ability to bring my kids’ homeschool education to life and also have a happy, thriving home.
We settled on using a Charlotte Mason-inspired approach that fit our family perfectly. We read the best in children’s literature and learned to use real books to teach instead of ho-hum textbooks. I eventually co-created a curriculum that parents can customize to fit their children instead of trying to make them fit a curriculum. After all, curricula is meant to be a tool, not a dictator.
Along with a more streamlined and effective homeschool, I had to continue prioritizing what I could do and couldn’t. This made (most of) my days go more smoothly, so I wasn’t always carrying that mountain of undone things on my back!
Then homeschooling became something we could all enjoy instead of the chore that it had been before.
Our home education and our home life had been transformed. And yours can be, too!
Want to learn how to bring your kids’ homeschool education to life and have a happy, thriving home? Do this first:
Drop your email address below, and I’ll send you my free ebook, 60 Creative Assignments Using Real Books. You’ll also get weekly-ish posts from a long-time homeschool mom who’s already graduated kids to college and then graduate school.
My Goal with this Website and Blog
Train up a Child Publishing is here to help you bring your kids’ homeschool education to life and have a happy, thriving home. With our literature-based, Charlotte Mason-inspired curriculum, helpful blog, and experienced mentoring, you can learn how to teach using science-research-based teaching methods, train your children to have good habits (and polish up some of yours in the process), and make simple changes to keep your household running smoothly.
After Joining My Online Community, Read Our Popular Posts
My blog has been around for a minute, so many resources are here to help you bring your children’s homeschool education to life. Whether you’re looking for:
- Help to decide whether or not to home-educate your children.
- How to provide lifegiving homeschooling
- Help to train your kids in these Basic Habits
- Ideas for Homeschool on a Budget
- How-to posts and lesson plans, such as How to Teach Narration
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The Thanksgiving holiday offers vast opportunities to get your children excited about thankfulness to God and giving to others. And, you can get excited about building your children’s character and employing some Thanksgiving fun into your home education. Or maybe you’re you’d like a few hands-on fun or Thanksgiving-themed writing ideas. Whatever the reason, spice […]
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As You Seek Help from my Blog Posts, Read More About Our Curricula
We offer literature-based, Charlotte Mason-inspired homeschool curricula written from a Christian point of view. For your kindergarten through high school students. And even better, it’s customizable to fit your family. Assignments are not just reading and writing, either. You build models. Plan and make Renaissance Feasts. Design costumes. Cook period meals. And much more.
Read more about it on our Curriculum Options page or click the graphics below.
From our FAQs Page
Yes, the Unit Program Tools are more economical. I know that’s a factor for most of us. But in the long run, you’ll be the happiest, and your home education will get the best results if you get the program that matches the way you want to teach.
You should choose the Daily Lesson Plans over our Unit Program Tools if this sounds like you:
- You don’t know what you should teach (or how to teach) history, science, art, or language arts. And you don’t have the time to figure it out.
- You don’t have the time or bandwidth to find the best children’s literature, collect fun project ideas, create interesting assignments, or find age-appropriate science experiments. The same goes for copy work, spelling, and vocabulary words — you want them provided for you. And you see the value of having them pulled from the history, science, and language arts your child is learning.
- You’re worried you aren’t covering the right things or enough of the right things. So, you’d feel more confident with structured daily lessons, especially when they include reading assignments, discussion questions, narration prompts, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and composition lessons all ready for you to teach.
What you really want is an open-and-go curriculum.
You should choose the Unit Program Tools over our Daily Lesson Plans if this sounds like you:
- Pulling together your own curriculum and lesson plans is something you love doing. You like to search the computer for activities, experiments, and projects. But you’d love to have a framework to start with so you’re not starting from scratch.
- You prefer homeschooling at your own pace and enjoy going down rabbit trails. You don’t want the pressure of a curriculum that tells you what to say and do.
- Teaching all or most of your children history, science, and fine arts at the same time with the same curriculum is the way you want to teach.
- You’re looking for a fabulous list of hundreds of exciting and often character-building books (that have been pre-read by someone with your values), organized chronologically by time period and topic to supplement this or another curriculum you’re already using.
American History I, World History I, General Literature, American Literature, British Literature, and World Literature are all full-year courses.
Our English electives are one-semester courses: Essay Styles for High School, The Art of Public Speaking, and The Steps to Writing a Research Paper.
First, our courses use real, whole, excellent books, instead of textbooks or excerpts of books.
Secondly, our courses are not “cookie-cutter” courses where everyone does the exact same assignment. Instead, our courses offer several choices of assignments, and you and your student are free to choose.
Yes, we have writing assignments, and we recommend your student write at least one or two of every essay type per high school course. But we also have assignments that utilize the gifts and talents God gave your high school student.
The assignment choices in our high school courses include building a model, cooking a historically accurate feast, dramatizing a scene from a story or an event, creating period costumes, illustrating a scene in a story, and more.
Using your students’ natural gifts will make learning not only more enjoyable, it will make the learning stick.
What homeschool moms like you are saying …
WOW! Your World History I course is thorough! Very well done. You make it easy for a teacher to use without having to do the expert research. After a year with this resource, no one will be second-guessing their choice [of a World History course], wondering whether there was a better one out there, or did they cover everything. Your course was well worth the wait! The only problem is, now I am salivating for World History II!
With admiration, Amy