With a plethora of homeschooling resources on the market today it can be overwhelming to navigate through all the options to find the best ones for your family. We know from experience! With a vision for homeschooling far beyond the 3 R’s, we set out looking for and incorporating materials that were founded on a biblical worldview and encouraged academic excellence.
In addition to creating some of our own materials, we found a variety of additional resources that aligned with our vision. There was still something missing, though, as we often scrambled and struggled to teach and correlate everything in a way that made sense to our children and ignited their own love for learning.
In the spring of 2015, we became aware of a program called Classical Conversations (CC). The more we investigated, the more we discovered that CC was a beautiful melding of a God-centered approach to education with a rigorous academic emphasis in the context of a supportive community! And thus began our venture into not only participating, but also directing/tutoring a Challenge A, then Challenge B seminar in our community and finally tutoring a couple of years of Essentials. We were excited to incorporate this for a season into our journey to know the truth, live the truth, and speak the truth with excellence.
Here are a few specific resources we’ve used over the years and found very beneficial:
Dispatches from the Front – A series of videos produced by Tim Keesee as he travels around the world getting live footage and firsthand testimony from people spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ!
Foundations in Personal Finance – An online self-study course for high schoolers produced by the Dave Ramsey organization that gives a fabulous introduction to real life finance, covering areas like budgeting, investing, goal-setting, and more. The combination of video clips, written material, quizzes, and journal questions is excellent for every learning style and highly practical for every high school student.
God’s Great Covenant – A 4-part Bible study curriculum that takes you through the entire Bible (Two books cover the Old Testament and two cover the New Testament).
History Revealed: Ancient Civilizations and the Bible – A fun unit study curriculum that provides a framework for studying history, geography, science, language, and the arts.
Summit Ministries YouTube Channel – Dozens of videos of excellence speakers on various topics!
Sword Study Bible Studies for Family Discipleship – Excellently written Bible studies with workbooks available for various ages to facilitate the whole family studying a book of the Bible together. We especially loved the 1 John study!
The Lost Tools of Writing (LTW) – We became aware of this through our involvement with Classical Conversations and Natalie subsequently pursued further training through the Circe Institute and has been teaching writing classes for middle school and high school students ever since. She loves the rotational focus on the Canons of Rhetoric and the way LTW equips students to think deeply and communicate persuasively.