Our Family’s Home Schooling Journey,
My Quest for the
Perfect Home School Curriculum
and How This Can Help You

If you had asked me before I got married, a home schooling journey was not even on my radar screen for where I would go in my life. But life can be full of surprises, can't it?

My husband and I first met in Japan while we were both here as short term workers, teaching English in a local church and doing administrative work. What started out for both of us as testing the waters to living overseas and doing ministry has become a passion in our hearts. Our family has now spent most of the last twenty years in Asia for our organization’s work with helping train pastors and churches in leadership principles. We love our work and the people we work with, and living in another culture for us has been a wonderful experience. All four of our kids were born in Japan and can speak Japanese fairly well. Their dad and I do our best, but sometimes I wish we could remember things as quickly as they do!

When our children were old enough, they went to the local Japanese preschool because we wanted them to learn the local language and customs. While that was an enjoyable experience for them, as time went on, we realized we wanted to spend more time with our children than we could with them in public school. We began to think about home schooling.

Home Schooling: Could I Do That?

It didn’t take too long to convince us that home schooling could be a great option for our family, especially since we move around so much and place a high value on spending time together. Home schooling would be a great way to offer stability for our children's education, and give us more time to pass our values on to our children. Thankfully, on our next extended time in the United States I was fortunate to get to know some families whom we respected and whose children, while not perfect, were on the path to becoming gracious, well-educated young men and women. We tried out the home school curriculum our friends used Sonlight Home Schooling Curriculum, and found (trumpets, please) ...
the Joy of Learning Through Home Schooling. Great! All set!

Home Schooling: Reality Sets In!

Well, the first major snag to come into this cozy home schooling picture leaped upon us when our second child, Butterflygirl (I’ll use these names for them on the Internet), started home schooling. Suddenly, what seemed like the perfect home school curriculum for her older sister, Poetrygirl, wasn’t working for Butterflygirl. She couldn’t understand it. She didn’t want to do it. She dawdled and resisted. Was she just not trying? Was it my teaching method? Did we need a new approach? More structure? Less structure?

The questions kept accumulating, but the answers seemed so elusive. Our Butterflygirl was starting to crumple and wilt. I was starting to crumple and wilt, too. Yet there was still Legoboy (a preschooler) and Princessgirl (a baby) ready to join our homeschool. How was I going to teach four children when I couldn’t even teach one? I knew I needed to do something to get on the right track. I looked ahead and saw far too much teacher-time trying to read aloud all the books for my kids and try to help them do all I wanted them to do with Sonlight. Maybe I should change home schooling methods. So I began to look around at what is out there.

My Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: Take Two

I am thankful I soon found Tapestry of Grace. Much like Sonlight, with great literature selections and lots of history, it is more focused around central themes that all the children study at their own level. This sounded great to me since I wouldn’t have four different history lessons to prepare for and we could all learn together.

And while I love Tapestry of Grace for many reasons, for us living in a small space and having to buy all the books we needed, it just was getting too expensive. I also found it was still a bit too teacher-intensive for me at that point in my life.

My Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: Take Three

So, again I went on a search for the Perfect Curriculum. This time I was perhaps a bit wiser knowing that there isn’t any Perfect Curriculum, but I was hoping I knew enough of what I didn’t want (lots of books I had to try to find -- in Japan! — and lots of teacher time on history) to know what to look for. And so in my search we found Robinson Curriculum, a home schooling method that focuses on giving the students the tools to learn for themselves, and which comes on CDs all ready to print out basically all the books you need. That sounded great to me. No more hours on the Internet searching for home schooling books.

The problem I found was that, though Robinson Curriculum met my desires not to be so teacher-focused, and not to have lots of books I had to buy, it didn’t meet other desires we had for our children’s education – desires that I didn’t even know we had until I realized that something just wasn’t working on this crazy home schooling journey.

Asking the Fundamental Questions

So, again I started a search on our home schooling journey. Yet, now, through all this trial and error, I began to realize that choosing curriculum is more than just using what your friends or mentors use. It is more than finding a method that suits you or your children. There are many factors that most of us don’t even stop to consider when we start out on this journey of schooling our children. Questions such as

• How do we want to incorporate our faith?
• Who will decide what our child learns and when?
• How do we evaluate success?
• What kind of literature do we want our child to read?
• What kind of role did I want to play?
• How does my child learn best?

In asking these questions and several others, I finally discovered some answers that helped give us a philosophy of education that really helped guide us in making some excellent choices to our home schooling. I began to have confidence both in saying yes to buying some things, and no to buying other things.

My Quest for the Perfect Curriculum: What Do We Use Now?

So, you might wonder what home school curriculum we use now. We have actually gone back to using

• Sonlight Curriculum with some modifications, along with
• Brave Writer resources,
• Living Math resources,
• Math-U-See and
• some Singapore Math.

What has changed? Why is it working for us now when it didn’t before?

To make a long home schooling journey short, for one thing, I am now less apt to feel like I have to check off boxes or feel like I have to do everything with Sonlight. I choose to do some things with the children all together (a la Tapestry of Grace), and I make sure they are more self-directed and have the tools and confidence to know where to get the answers and teach themselves if they need to (like Robinson Curriculum).

I also now realize that I’m not the same person I was when we first started our home schooling journey. Our perceptions and values have been molded by various experiences and we’ve gone through a natural development as a family. I guess I’d say we now have a more mature understanding of who we are and where we want to go. This has helped me know how to focus my time better.

I have also learned a few organizational tips and best practices that have really helped. I will enjoy sharing them as soon as I can.

The Key to a Joyful, Successful Home Schooling Journey

Lastly, I am also now more aware that the greatest factor in my children’s long-term educational – and life -- success is not to be found in a home school curriculum, not even the very best one. It is to be found in the depth of our relationship. There is so much to share about this and how it relates to our home schooling that I just can’t share it all now. I look forward to writing more on how this works out in reality in future pages.

There is a lot of information that I am eager to share with you to help you choose home school curriculum that will enhance the joy and success of your family’s home school. I look forward to walking with you through your journey to choosing the best home schooling curriculum for your family.

What You’ll Find Here

What you’ll find here are tools, advice and resources to help you in your journey to find the best home school curriculum for your family. I’m only an expert in that I’ve made lots of mistakes and thought a lot about it! Are all our days joyful and successful? Not at all. We are still very much on the journey! I’m a few steps ahead of some people; many steps behind others. I have, however, spent many hours pondering what does it take to make wise choices about home school curriculum (both in how you choose it and how you use it), and am developing tools to help you apply what I've learned in your real-life situations. I look forward to sharing those tools with you through this site.

While the idea for this website grew out of an idea to help our children learn about a home business what you’ll find here is a fair amount of my own journey in self-discovery in these pages.

Early on I had wished for a website to help me figure out how to choose home school curriculum. Yet, now I realize that perhaps I have been able to learn from these experiences so that I can share with you and help you and your family.

If you have ever wanted to find a site to help you do something, or if you have learned the hard way some things that you’d like to pass on to others, let me encourage you to see how a non-techie like me has built this site How I Built This Site. I think it will encourage you that you could share what you’ve learned, be helpful to others, and even develop another stream of income through it.

I look forward to traveling with you on your home schooling journey. I hope you’ll bookmark this site and come back often as you think about how to choose the best home schooling curriculum products for your family. It is a privilege to walk with you even a short ways on your journey, and I pray that you will experience more joy and success in your home school because of what you find here.

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