Research, research and did I mention research?

Countless hours listening to YouTube curriculum reviews, surfing curriculum websites, pouring over review sites.. it’s been a journey!

I began researching curriculum just after my son turned two. I started with a simple google search for Christian curriculum. I also talked with a lady from my church who had homeschooled before.

Out the gate I was looking at and comparing three different curriculum, Abeka, BJU Press and Masterbooks.

Abeka and BJU Press were not only big names in the homeschool world but they were also the ones recommended to me by my church friend. They also happen to be based in Independent Baptist doctrine and used the KJV for bible references (I’ll go into more on the KJV, etc. in another post).

Masterbooks is a different kind of curriculum. It‘s based on a blend of traditional and Charlotte Mason styles of homeschooling. At the time I had no idea what the different styles were but the Masterbooks mission statement and community appealed to me.

My husband, a high school science teacher, and I discussed the options. We determined between Abeka or BJU Press we preferred Abeka. He was not a fan of Masterbooks from how I had described it so I delved into more research particularly about the styles of homeschooling.

Reluctantly my husband agreed to listen to a YouTube video from Simply Charlotte Mason titled The Five Flavors of Homeschooling. To my surprise he determined that he thought Classical was the way to go.

Classical?! Really? This threw me a curve ball I was not expecting but he was insistent. So... more research.

I looked into lots of classical based curriculums but mostly at Classical Conversations and Memoria Press. This was not the direction I thought we would be taking, however, the videos produced by Memoria Press won me over. I was now team Classical. My reservations were that Memoria Press was founded by a Catholic and maintained that view point and that so much of the Classical literature was Greek and Roman Mythology.

And then one day, quite by accident I found it. There was an article shared to a homeschool support Facebook group I was a part of about the styles of homeschooling. I knew we had decided on Classical but I thought I’d look at it anyway. In that article they mentioned a sub category of classical I had never heard of before, Biblical Classical education/ The Principle Approach. So, more research...

Up until now it had been easy to find information about anything homeschool, but I felt like I had met my match. I couldn’t find anything except a YouTube video of a tape from the 80’s of some women sitting around discussing “The Noah Plan”. With persistence I managed to find two Facebook pages about the Principle Approach. The ladies on each were very helpful when I contacted them. They pointed me in the direction of The Foundation for American Christian Education (FACE). It didn’t take long to discover I had found the base curriculum for us.

Along the way I found several things I plan to incorporate into my sons education that I’ll detail in later posts but for now this gives you an idea of where we started thinking about homeschool and where we ended up.

If you are interested in a Biblical Classical education I highly encourage you to check out face.net