Homeschooling - Our Freshman Curriculum

Homeschool continues to grow in popularity. Some of this is due to curriculum concerns. Some due to COVID protocols and the unpredictability of schools that continue to alternate between in person and remote learning. Others, I think, have leaned toward homeschooling because the homebound instruction during the earliest stages of the pandemic showed them that parent-led learning was possible.

There are many reasons to homeschool, but I think the best reasons include it being a form of learning that fits the needs of the student. So, for example, it may be better for a student with special needs to get the attention available from a local public school. Or, for a parent and child whose personalities clash, it may be better to commit to a private religious school. For those of us that have options, it is good to consider which one serves the student the best.

My family committed to homeschooling early on and it is has worked well for us. One of the enjoyable parts of the high school experience has been shaping a curriculum that fits the personality of our eldest and will push her to grow as a person as a student.

Since she is very verbal student, there is a lot of reading in her curriculum. We value the Great Conversation, so I have made an effort to begin her high school with ancient cultures and texts, with the intention of getting her into the modern era when she is a senior.

In case some might find it helpful, I am going to describe her freshman curriculum here.

Math and Science

We purchased Math and Science curricula off the shelf. Math has been a source of parent-child stress over the years with our oldest student, so we used Thinkwell’s homeschool honors Algebra I material for the freshman year. It has tended to make the learning process much less stressful and it is a solid, interactive mathematics course. For science, our homeschool co-op was doing the Marine Biology labs from Apologia’s catalog. The community support for that worked well for us.

Critical Thinking

The learning outcomes for this course are:

1. Learn to think well, fairly, honestly, and clearly about big ideas.

2. Consider how thinking well supports living a moral life.

These outcomes will follow through all four years of this approach. In support of this, our student had to read volumes that were selected to get her thinking about the world, about ideas, and about how thinking takes place. I had her read:

C. S. Lewis, “On Reading Old Books”

Lloyd Alexander, The Gawgon and the Boy

Epstein and Kerberger, Critical Thinking

Bluedorn and Bluedorn, The Thinking Toolbox

Bluedorn and Bluedorn, The Fallacy Detective

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Dogma is the Drama”

C. S. Lewis, “Religion and Rocketry”

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks

Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Creative Mind”

Most of these resources are either directed thinking and logic explicitly or are from a friendly perspective. As she matures, the intention is to put more challenging perspectives into this mix.

English Literature

Freshman English was intended to hit some of the high point English literature. This was intended to complement another course in the homeschool co-op that ended up cancelled. I will probably revise this for the next two, but this is how the year went. I had her read six novels over the course of the year. Given the extent of the reading for the Great Conversations portion of the curriculum, the brevity of this list did not seem problematic.

The learning outcomes for this course were:

1. Read significant works of English literature for familiarity and to engage with our shared culture.

2. Improve writing reading, thinking, and writing skills by summarizing books as they are read.

3. Appreciate the beauty of the written word in the English language.

4. Critically engage with literary themes in major works of fiction by writing essays that draw together themes and ideas.

The books selected were:

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

I had her do a little research on the historical context of each novel, a biographical summary of the author, and a brief summary of the work. Additionally, I assigned a 500-1,000 word essay on each novel.

The writing was supposed to be covered by the co-op class. So I hadn’t thought the essays through. This was a bit frustrating because of the quality of the work was not very good. Over the course of the year, I figured out this was because the student did not understand how to arrive at a thesis, and instead continually defaulted to attempting to compare and contrast works. I think my vision for these assignments was ahead of where she was developmentally. If I had this to do again, I would assign a thesis, which is what I did for Sophomore literature. For the Sophomore curriculum, I also made “literature” a parallel track to Great Conversations, to get more of the volumes from the same time period but read them from a more literary angle.

Spiritual Disciplines

One of the major reasons we homeschool is so that we can make spiritual disciplines a part of the curriculum. The learning outcomes for this course are:

1. Grow toward Christlikeness by reading and meditating on important books, both contemporary and historical.

2. Develop the practice of journaling as a discipleship tool.

As a result, the assignments were to do the reading and write a journal each week. The texts for the course were intended to reinforce Christian doctrine and faithful practice of spiritual disciplines. They included:

J. C. Ryle, Holiness.

Augustine, On Christian Teaching (or On Christian Doctrine).

Brother Lawrence, Practicing the Presence of God.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

Dorothy L. Sayers, “Strong Meat” in The Whimsical Christian, 17-23.

Gloria Furman, Alive in Him.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

History

We have followed a basic 4-year cycle for much of our time homeschooling, though one year we substituted in a year-long study of the Eastern Hemisphere. The plan is to do another 4-year cycle through high school, this time including reading that accompanies the time period.

I chose Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the World series to use as a backbone. We had already purchased all four of her The Story of the World books and encouraged the kids to read them as supplements, so taking the step to the next level seemed appropriate. Additionally, Bauer seems to deal more fairly with Christianity than some approaches without slipping into pandering as do some of the overtly Christian approaches.

Bauer’s History of the World books have accompanying curriculum, which we purchased. In addition, I created a Google Classroom for this course with a topic per week. In the classroom, I linked a lot of the CrashCourse YouTube videos and other videos that help provide visual stimulation and additional support for the ideas in the curriculum. Each chapter also had an objective quiz in the classroom, so that we could monitor whether the reading was being done well enough without having to hover.

I scheduled about eight exams for the course of the year. Each of the exams was an essay question, with essays selected from a pre-published list of the long form questions in the History of the World student curriculum. It was an introduction to the Blue Book exams that were the torment of many college students.

The learning outcomes for Ancient History were:

1. Gain a sense of the trajectory of history, the development of human culture, and how motivations and ideas shape human responses to events.

2. Meditate on why studying history is a vital discipline for a virtuous life.

3. Think critically about politics, society, science, and culture to better engage a diverse world.

These learning outcomes will be common for the four years and are the target of the high school history program, not the focus of this year, only.

Old Testament

Again, one of the reasons we homeschool is to include religious instruction in our curriculum. Therefore, one of the subjects this year was a survey of the Old Testament. Once I figured out how the Google Classroom thing worked, I decided to give homemade Old Testament instruction a try.

In the past, I haven’t been as engaged in the teaching aspect of homeschool because I’ve been at work. However, by created a weekly video of me lecturing on a given topic or book of the Old Testament, I could be directly involved in instruction without being present during normal school hours or having to have energy on a given night.

And so, I put together a robust reading list, a set of standard objectives for each book of the Old Testament, a weekly quiz, and a video of me, filmed in my basement office. Additionally, I included one of the Bible Project videos for each book, and sometimes lectures or sermons on a specific verse or book that were helpful and instructive. To kick off the year, I had the student watch David Platt’s Secret Church videos where he goes through all of the Old Testament in about 4 hrs.

There were weekly quizzes, chapter exams, and self-reported Bible reading reports this year.

The Old Testament Learning Outcomes were:

1. Explain the overarching themes and message of every book in the Old Testament.

2. Gain a deeper appreciation for the gift of special revelation, particularly the Old Testament.

3. Defend Christianity against basic cultural criticism based on the nature and content of the Old Testament.

4. Explain the historical contours of the Old Testament History.

The reading list was extensive. There were selections from several other volumes, but the following books were assigned in their entirety (except for only reading the OT portions of Schreiner):

Mark Dever. The Message of the Old Testament. Wheaton: Crossway, 2006.

Andrew E. Hill and John H. Walton. A Survey of the Old Testament. 2nd Edition. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000.

Thomas Schreiner. The King in His Beauty. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013.

Michael Cosper. Faith Among the Faithless: Learning from Esther How to Live in a World Gone Mad. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2018.

C. S. Lewis. Reflections on the Psalms. New York: HarperCollins, 1958.

Francis Schaeffer. Genesis in Time and Space. In The Collected Works, vol 2. Downers Grove: Crossway, 1983.

_____. No Final Conflict. In The Collected Works, vol 2. Downers Grove: Crossway, 1983.

_____. Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History. In The Collected Works, vol 2. Downers Grove: Crossway, 1983.

This amount of reading only works because the student is a high-level reader and because the reading makes up the bulk of the course content.

Great Conversations

The summer before starting high school, I assigned Sophie’s World to provide an introduction to the intellectual history of the West. Along with that, I assigned a list of names for the student to research and write a paragraph about, so the list of new characters would be diminished over the course of this first year.

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s essay “On Reading Old Books” this curriculum represents an attempt to go back to original sources. I decided it was better to try to hit some of the major works in full rather than trying to do selections of a wider range of sources. The readings were generally sorted in chronological order. I ordered standard English translations, usually from a recent source to try to get the best reading experience possible.

The course learning outcomes were:

1. Engage in the “Great Conversation” by reading books written by men of women of diverse backgrounds and eras to better understand the human condition.

2. Enrich the understanding of the history of ideas by reading primary sources to support the readings in history.

3. Meditate on why studying history is a vital discipline for a virtuous life.

4. Improve writing reading, thinking, and writing skills by summarizing books as they are read.

The assigned readings included:

Myths from Mesopotamia (Gilgamesh and Epic of Creation)

Homer’s Iliad

Homer’s Odyssey

OUP Presocratics volume, intro only

Finn, History: A Student’s Guide

Plato’s Republic

Plato, Defense of Socrates and Other Essays

Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric

Aristotle, Politics

Virgil, Aenid

Sima Qian, The First Emperor

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Confucius, The Analects

The Bhagavad Gita

Plato, Gorgias

Cicero, The Republic

Cicero, The Laws

Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

Cicero, On Life and Death

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Aeschylus, Libation Bearers

Aeschylus, The Eumenides

Euripides, Medea

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

1-2 Maccabees

Josephus, War of the Jews (Selections)

Early Christian Writings

Many of these were referenced in Bauer’s book in History, especially the non-Western texts. It wasn’t possible to line this reading up exactly with History, but there was enough overlap so there was plenty of interplay.

In addition to the reading, the only other assignment was to keep a notebook with a summary of the historical context, a biographical sketch of the author, and a summary of the work. I would check in with the student periodically to see how the reading was going. The written work was not always exemplary, but was good evidence through discussions that the reading was happening and things were beginning to come together. Many of these volumes could be the study of a lifetime, so the goal for this course is exposure and increasing appetite rather than getting everything from them on the first pass.

There is no question that this is a Western-heavy reading list. Since we live in the US and since many of these books have been so influential through history, this seems natural. I did, however, make an effort to include some significant texts from other ancient cultures. Ancient cultures of every sort are so foreign to ours that even the Western canon is a form of multi-culturalism, but these is something to be said for having read The Bhagavad Gita and Confucius’ Analects in addition to a fair amount of Plato and Aristotle.

Some experts in education will probably tell me that this volume of reading is excessive. Looking back, I would have cut a couple of volumes from this list. However, when you recall that this is both homework and class, the volume makes more sense.

Concluding Thoughts

This post is already too long, so I will save discussion about my philosophy of curriculum development for another post. This approach was possible largely because my student is a very motivated reader.

Raising kids and homeschooling is a decades long experiment with no control group. We will see how it goes, but this is part of the approach I’ve been using and I offer it for your information.

Sophie's World - A Review

There are a few seminary students that I know that still live in fear of their introduction to philosophy course, and they’ve already graduated.

For some people, philosophy and its history remains a mystery even after they read the books, write the paper, and pass the test. And yet, the history of philosophy is a significant subject of concern for people that want to understand our present culture, because today’s culture is built on yesterday’s ideas.

In trying to educate my children, I have wondered how to provide an introduction to philosophical ideas that would put things at the right level without losing the content to critique or so watering down the concepts as to make them unintelligible. When a friend noted that her homeschool co-op was going to use Sophie’s World as a way of introducing these concepts I was intrigued and ordered a copy.

Sophie’s World is a novel about the history of philosophy. It is also a novel about a young Norwegian girl named Sophie. I can’t give away too much of the structure without spoiling some of the mystery that unfolds over the course of the book, but suffice it to say there are some strange twists to the plot that make the story interesting, if a bit bizarre, and are actually useful in illustrating some of the points of the volume.

I am not a philosopher, but I have studied enough philosophy to recognize when a named philosopher is being described accurately. Within the realm of academia, of course, there are heated debates about what Plato really meant and whether the Cynics were always in earnest. However, this book takes the entry level historical discussions of philosophers and presents their perspectives in a recognizable way. Leave it to the college professor to nuance the understanding, and deepen it with more data, but this is Newtonian physics in a quantum world: pretty close to accurate and simple enough to gain a foothold for later exploration.

As a Christian theologian, the representations of Christian thinkers was the most distorted. The Christians depicted by Gaarder are flat and lifeless. This is probably the way a philosopher views the explanations of some of the different schools of philosophy. It isn’t debilitating, but it is unimpressive. Some students are likely to gain a little of the famous sophomoric skepticism from reading the book, but a rich immersion in theology afterward is likely to help reinforce sound doctrine.

Sophie’s World also has strong preference for the myth of progress. The storyline of philosophy is presented as if each philosopher advanced on the theories of previous philosophers toward some future state when, if Gaarder got his way, everyone would be governed by the United Nations. Considering that this book was originally published by a Norwegian in 1994, that view of things is understandable, but that piece of the story gets a little preachy.

Some parents may have concern about a few elements of the story, as well. Throughout the story, the young teenager Sophie lies to her mother (her estranged father is away at sea) and meets up alone with a middle-aged man who becomes her philosophy tutor. Parts of this read like the lead up to a 20/20 episode, but fortunately it doesn’t result in the tragic end that would have made the air. In the chapter on Sigmund Freud there is a reference to a boy dreaming about balloons that are said to represent a girl’s breasts, which is pretty tame as Freud goes.

The last couple of chapters dip into the absurd. At Sophie’s philosophy themed birthday party the participants behave bizarrely, with one of Sophie’s friend pouncing on a male classmate with kissing implied and apparent sex in the bushes, off camera. The girl declares that she’s pregnant (absurdly) to reinforce just what’s going on. Of course, what the reader gets from some of these references will depend on what the reader knows, so parents are likely to read more into the stories than an innocent child. In any case, none of these concerns are enough to justify avoiding the book. The questionable content is not extreme, nor is it close to what is available in a lot of young adult literature, but it is easier to know in advance as a parent than to find out after your child points it out.

As a vehicle for communicating the history of philosophy, this is an excellent volume. There are points where the text does turn a bit dry and the dialogue does seem more like philosophy notes than conversation, but the novel is a vessel for the content. As a novel, this would not be on my list of top stories, but there is enough story and character to make the drier content more engaging. Taken as a whole, this is a very useful tool for introducing a young student to philosophy in a manageable, reasonably entertaining format.

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics)

By Jostein Gaarder

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Window on the World - A Review

Finding helpful resources for discipling children can be a challenge. It is difficult to find resources that are reasonably up to date, engaging, and avoid theologically tendentious assertions.

In particular, teaching children about other cultures and the pressing need for a broader vision and calling to cross-cultural evangelism, especially through international missions. One helpful resource has been the Operation World concept adapted for children in the Window on the World book. That full-color volume gives an introduction to world cultures, nations, and religious ideas in a brief, engaging manner. However, due to the passage of time and shifting of political winds, many of the entries had become outdated and factually inaccurate.

Thankfully, IVP has released a revised edition of the Window on the World book. This roughly 200 page volume has been updated with new pictures, correct sociological data, and different people groups. It, too, will need to be updated before long. In the meanwhile, this is a resource that missionally minded parents would do well to invest in.

Window on the World has ninety-two entries. There are fifty-two countries discussed, thirty-four people groups, and six discussions of major world religions.

Each of the entries is visually engaging with up-to-date color pictures, maps, and informational panels that offer specific prayer topics and important statistics. The text is simply written with an emphasis of personal accounts of families or children from within the given people group or nation.

At two pages each, the topics discussed in the book are far from exhaustive. However, they provide enough information to interest a young reader or listener in the world outside his or her own experience. It personalizes the lostness of the world, the ongoing persecution of Christians in other cultures, and the importance of praying for, given to, and participating in cross-cultural missions.

This volume is organized alphabetically, which means that linear progress through the volume can sometimes be uneven. It will take a bit of planning to study particular regions of the world in sequence. However, it is just this sort of shifting between the Hui people group to the nation of Iceland to the country of India that will keep some young readers flipping the pages.

Window on the World provides a way for homeschool parents to teach their children about the lostness of the world and disciple them toward prayer and engagement in cross-cultural missions. In addition to its information, it has specific suggestions for praying for each of the entries. The length is appropriate for reading at a meal time or including as a brief topic between other academic subjects. Similarly, it may be possible to incorporate this resource into a study of geography.

Parents who do not homeschool will also find this a helpful resource, since it could be used for a family devotional activities in the evenings or on weekends. It is friendly to a wide range of theological traditions, since it focuses on the socio-political information of each entry, but could be part of a regular pattern of teaching in the home.

This is the sort of book that will intrigue many children, especially those who find encyclopedias engaging. The layout, writing style, and brevity of the entries makes this a feast for those youngsters that find Usborne or DK books so entertaining. Even absent a parental strategy of organized teaching on world missions, this volume could accomplish the same ends merely by being placed on an appropriate shelf.

The church should be thankful for IVP for updating this valuable resource. The editors, Jason Mandryk and Molly Wall, have provided a service to the body of Christ as we seek to raise up another generation with a heart for seeing people from every tribe and tongue and nation come to Christ.

Window on the World: An Operation World Prayer Resource (Operation World Resources)

By Molly Wall

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.