Homeschooling

School at the kitchen table

We use Abeka, we run it on a screen, and it takes far less of my day than people expect. This page is how it works, why we chose it, the material we make for other families, and how you can help pay for the next of it.

Three children, all at home, all schooled at home. I get asked more questions about this than about anything else on this site, so here it is in one place: what we use, how the digital part works, why it is easier than most people imagine, and what we make for other families once we have made it for ourselves.

What we use: Abeka

We use Abeka, the Christian curriculum from Christian Liberty Press, which has been published since 1972. It is a graded, textbook curriculum: Phonics, Reading, Cursive, Language, Creative Writing, Spelling, Arithmetic, History and Geography, Science, Health, Bible and Art. Every year of every grade is laid out in advance, so I am not inventing a syllabus at the kitchen table at half past eight in the morning.

Abeka comes two ways, and families mix them. There are video lessons — around 170 a year per grade, with a video manual that tells you which lesson to run that day — and there are parent-led kits, where the books are the same and I teach from them. We use the lessons for the subjects where a child sitting in front of a screen learns well on their own, and I take the rest myself.

What settled it for me was the scope and sequence. Abeka publishes a detailed list of every concept and skill by grade and subject, free to download, so you can read exactly what a second grader is meant to know before you spend a penny. I have printed that document more times than I would like to admit.

What digital actually changed

This is the part nobody believes, and it is the whole difference. A lesson is a video. The child sits down, starts it, does the work in the book, and the test at the end of the unit is marked and scored without me touching it. The record of what they got right and wrong is already there.

So my job is not to teach arithmetic. My job is to start the day, sit with the children who need company, check what they wrote, look at the one lesson they stumbled through, and decide what to reteach before supper. That is a real job and it takes real time — but it is a few hours, not a whole day, and it is the reason this is workable with small children in the house.

• No bags, no lost worksheets, no binder that comes home at the bottom of a bag.
• No missed days because someone had a temperature.
• Nothing to hand in and nothing to chase.
• A child who falls behind gets caught up over a week, not punished over a term.

None of that makes it free. But it makes it small.

Easier than you may think

The honest version: it is a couple of hours of focused time in the morning, and the rest of the day is ordinary life. Our shape is roughly this.

• Morning. Reading aloud, then each child works their lessons.
• Midday. Kitchen, farm, chores, whatever the day held.
• Afternoon. Sport, work on the farm, reading for pleasure.
• Once or twice a week. I sit with each child over their work properly.

Two things people find surprising. First, you do not have to be a teacher. The curriculum is written for parents, which means the teaching aids, the answer keys and the lesson plans already exist, and your job is closer to a coach than to a lecturer. Second, the cost is mostly up front — a year's books and access per child — rather than a bill that arrives every month.

Why we chose it

We wanted to raise them in the world we actually want them to live in, which is a sentence about values and not about other families. We know good homeschool families and good school families, and I would not say a worse word about a classroom than the teachers I have met in them. We simply wanted to decide for ourselves what our children were surrounded by, and to have the days flexible enough to be with them.

It is worth being honest that our three are quick. They pick things up fast, they ask enormous questions, and they have covered more ground than I expected them to — more than I would have expected from a classroom day that includes thirty children and a bell. That is our observation of our own children, and it is what we have seen other families say to us. It is not a study, and I am not going to pretend it is one.

Sports have been the best of it. They swim, they play, they have friends and a team and a coach who is not me — homeschooling has not isolated them, it has changed the shape of the week. What it has changed is what they are exposed to when nobody is choosing it for them.

“My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:” Proverbs 1:8

What we make for other families

When we started, we could not find the thing we needed, so we made it. That is still how most of it happens: something our children needed, made properly, tested on three of them first, and then given away or published for other families.

The material we put out is digital and printable — unit studies, worksheets, reading and spelling practice, history and science packs, and the planners and trackers that make a year of home school legible on one screen. It is built to sit alongside Abeka, not to replace it, and to fill the gaps we found rather than to compete with a twenty-year curriculum.