I’m not sure what to say here, because if you read this blog at all you know exactly how I educate my kids. But I’ll try to sum it up in a nutshell. For more details, poke around in my archives.

As my name indicates (and my tag line too), I use the Biblical Principle Approach. That means I view things governmentally, that is, who or what is in control. We see that all subjects originate from God and how we fit into HisStory. How does this work day to day?

Our lessons use a natural 4-R process of learning: research, reason, relate, record. We use a Christian classical method, I guess you would say. The lessons spring from Biblical principles and we expand them as the children are able to reason more deeply. Our focus is not on topics, or even subjects, but on the principles and rudiments of each subject. Once a child understands the basic principles and rudiments he has the tools to master the subject as an independent learner.

I absolutely adore BPA and will never use anything else (and believe me, I’ve tried!). Once I learned how to teach mychild using Biblical principles it’s hard to do anything else, even with the hard work it requires of me.

 I have a wide gap between my kids (4th grade, 1st grade and 3yo), so I have to rely on the principles during our lessons. I expand them to fit the ability of each of them. My 3yo loves to sit with us and “do school too,” so he sits in his own chair and I give him work to do (coloring, file folder games, etc) because if he’s not in the room with us something will go wrong! We have some school, take a break, have a little more, and then after lunch we do foreign language and enrichment. I try to break up the day into small bites so we don’t get burned out with a big chunk of time. It works for us.

We try to do a variety of things–writing, activities, reading aloud, whatever will spice up the lesson without being busy work. I try to keep lessons simple and not get carried away with activities. I find I tend to focus on the next thing and not the point of the lesson, so we keep things simple.

We also educate year-round, so we take off the month of December to focus on Christ’s birth. We take off many days throughout the year and it is working well for us. I like not having big chunks of time off to goof around. I plan my lessons all along, according to a basic plan I create in August each year. I can tweak it as necessary throughout the year. 

We are heading into our fifth year of home education and in a lot of ways I still feel like a newbie. But that’s part of the joy for me. There’s always new ground to cover, new joys to discover and new challenges to overcome. And there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing my child “get it”, when their eyes light up at the satisfaction of learning. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Well I sort of hate to do this, because as soon as I post it here, it probably won’t get done as written. ha! I am looking forward to this year more than I have in a while. I have renewed vision and I have studied hard to prepare myself. Also I have accumulated many resources so I have enrichment activities at my fingertips. (I am NOT going to get into a lecturing rut this year.)

Our over-arching principle is the Christian Principle of Self-Government. All we do this year will focus on being more self-governed in our spiritual lives, in our lessons, in our chores, in our personal lives, in our speech and in our service to others. More than anything else, I want us to increase our self-government this year. If this time next year we are more self-governed, I count the year a raging success.

As for our actual lessons, I have taken a decidedly low-key approach. I am not going to overplan and overschedule. I am planning less material so we can actually savor the material, and work on doing an excellent job as we increase our capacity for Christian self-government. I am tired of rushing from thing to thing. We will do less to do more. What I mean is we will get more in-depth with the principles and not just stick to the surface with facts. Here is our schedule:

MWF:Bible, literature, science (M and W), math, Princess G will do this reading program

TT: Bible, HisStory/geography, art, math (reinforcement)

daily: creative writing, reading aloud, family altar, Spanish

This is very manageable for our family. I try to do Bible and academics in AM and enrichment in PM (after lunch). Science works well for us in the afternoon so we have more time for experiments and walks. Art and writing are also good in the afternoon when we have time to enjoy them. Spanish will move to the evenings so we can do it as a family.

Here are my resources:

Bible: JBC–love this curriculum, but it is an investment of time, because you have to do the work yourself. There is a support group too.

HisStory: my own plans with the help of Lisa’s Freedom and Simplicity in HisStory materials (although I do love Mrs. Smith’s HisStory books for kids too!)

Science: Dr. Worthington Hooker’s materials

Literature: my own plans, lots of good literature, main study will be Bach (I think!)

Geography: various stuff from HomeschoolEstore and other sources

Creative writing: this book

Reading aloud: many books, along with some help from this book

Art: various sources, including this excellent book. Also we will make many books by hand, along with ATC’s and other various paper arts. Also I like to use art cards, so we will work them in somehow.

Read this post about how I actually plan my lessons with the help of Mr. Rose’s book.

One book I highly recommend is Managers of Their Homes. I read it often for help with ordering our days.

Please leave a note if you’d like me to list the resources I use to enrich my lessons. There are so many great books out there and they are so much fun!

In the younger grades I emphasize American His Story for several reasons:

•  We strive the think governmentally. Even young children can understand the principles inherent to America’s founding. We can discuss cause to effect, internal to external and expand the principles as they grow. These principles apply to many things, but they are expressed in our form of government, so we can look there.
• Symbols of America are in all of society. We are surrounded with flags, portraits on money, sayings, holidays and more that lend themselves to curiosity and teachable moments.
• To restore America’s Christian history.
• Children enjoy learning about their country. They want to know all about it; the geography, the founding, the Pilgrims and Presidents. We are all naturally curious to know about where we live.
• It is easy to find good literature related to American history.
• It can be easier for young children to relate to than ancient history.
• Because we are Americans. No matter what our family’s heritage, we are Americans and should know our own heritage. This seems to cause a problem for a lot of people. If they were to hear about French or Peruvian children studying their histories they would encourage that. But somehow if we want to learn about our own country’s Christian His Story, something is wrong.
• They can trace God’s Providence readily, so it can be applied to other areas of their lives. They can follow it straight to themselves and see that they fit into God’s plan for His Kingdom, America and the world.

To make myself clear, we follow the Chain of Christianity each year, so we do talk about all time periods from Creation to today, I simply choose to spend a little more time on American His Story in the younger grades.

When they are older we discuss the Greeks, Romans and other ancient history in depth when they are able to reason as we are thinking governmentally. I look forward to those days. I just hope I can keep up! lol

I am reading this terrific book about children and writing. I literally stumbled across it at a used bookstore and instantly fell in love. One thing jumped out at me right off the bat. I am not teaching writing, I am teaching writers. That little semantic shift made all the difference to me. The Lord has been dealing with me about adding more writing to our home education. Well this book will show you how to spark a passion for writing in any child. We all long to be understood, and good writing will satify that need.

My English goals for this year are to start a writing portfolio and to write something every day. And not only my children, but me. We are going to play with words every day–definitions, poetry, essays, read-alouds, word games, lots of good literature and more. They must not only learn to reason, but to articulate their postition intelligently. And I wnat them to enjoy the process. I think my renewed excitement for language will do just that.

In this post I said that as a home educator I hope you are always evaluating what works. To me this is one of the best things about what we do. We are free to try new things and evaluate what works–and what doesn’t. For us a struggle has been the whole idea of separate subjects. I understand that the BPA philosophy keeps the subjects separate so they retain their distinctiveness. They have a reason for the traditional “school” model and I have no problem with that, in general. However it has not ever worked so great in my home. (see Dee’s post on BPA unit studies)

So I was at my local used homeschool bookstore the other day when I came across a book that describes how to create your own unit studies. A bell went off. I have wanted to do unit studies since my oldest was in K (we even used FIAR before moving to BPA). My heart leapt. Could I really do unit studies with BPA? I never really thought I could, so I kept on with what I knew. It was great and things were pretty good, but something was missing.

Now that I have added my 5dd, I really want our lessons to be interesting and educational and engaging. I want them both (and my ds as well) to love learning. (see this post) The best times we have had were little types of unit studies, with Benjamin West and other topics that I sort of tied together.

But the rest of the time has been “regular”. It was not making me happy as a teacher. I do not want to focus on academics per se, but on the rudiments, the first things to know. What we have been doing is not really engaging, at least for us. Everything is disjointed and unrelated. So I took the unit study book home and looked at it. I was so glad I did!

As I read through it a light bulb came on, I realized that BPA and unit studies are very compatible. Here are some reasons why:

• unity with diversity: subjects flow together naturally, nurturing a love of learning, but still distinctive.
• As the child grows, they are able to see the 4-R’s process more clearly, so they are able to move to independent study naturally.
• You are able to relate a principle to the whole topic, as well as to individual subject, so it will flow well.
• Personally, I believe that this method is more like real life. They can master the subjects as they relate to one another, as opposed to disconnected “boxes” of subjects.

These were my two dreams in educating my children: BPA and to use  unit studies to do that. Now I can do both. Praise to God for the journey I am on. Each step I have taken has led me to the next. I don’t regret anything I have done to this point because each was a necessary step to get me here.

In my next post I will go into detail about our first unit study, which may surprise you.

I came across these free lovely pages for those of you who like writing things down (as opposed to keeping stuff on the computer). Print as you like. I already printed out a bunch myself. Enjoy! And be sure to see her shop for other beautiful items.

Well my 3rd grade lessons came today! I am really excited, now that I got to see them in person. I would have liked to have more information from FACE before I ordered, like sample pages and a list of topics covered, but I called, so I knew what to expect. Here’s my take at first glance.

Opening with BPA in general and BPA 3rd grade was helpful. I wanted to know what they expect of 3rd graders in their school just as a point of reference. Getting Ready for 3rd grade had even more info. Then they have a bunch of stuff I don’t use: school supply list, classroom constitution, report card and such. Their list of required  resources and optional resources (with their abbreviations) is something I will refer to as well.

The lesson plans are comprehensive for the following subjects: Bible, Bible as Reader, English, Literature, His-Story, geography and science. The supplemental info in the back has overviews for all the subjects and also ones for art, music and PE. They included some graphic organizers, presentation ideas and more to make things easier. And I enjoyed “Cultivating the Love of Learning in Third Grade.”

Their lessons are organized by week. They offer a principle, leading idea, materials for the lessons, lesson content and student work. They offer quarterly reading instruction and overviews for math but it is not covered. We use Ray’s anyway so that’s not important.

I am at a place now that I believe I can modify as I need to as the year progresses. I feel no pressure to complete everything in the lesson, or even in the way they suggest. But I am thankful they offer these to help me proveide an excellent education to my children without wearing myself out. As the year progresses I hope to offer updates on how thigns are going.

In our break this week I have been a busy bee, trying to prepare lessons for the next 12 weeks so that I can focus on the principles and not spend all my time preparing on the weekends. You may know that we educate year-round, with a month off in April, August and December. This works very well for us.

So my plans are in overdrive. With God’s grace I was already able to plan for things that are sort of easy to plan–math (Ray’s), science (Dr. Hooker), art and English (McGuffey). Because I follow the recommendations for these subjects, that was not complicated. I find the principle and go from there.

History/geography and literature will be combined this quarter, with a majority of the study on Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin. I love literature studies and know that this will be a lot of fun. However I must do a lot more preparation for this, so the majority of my remaining time will be on this.

Do you wonder where my Bible plans are? Well, like Miiko, I use that as my own spiritual study, so I do that as we go. It is so enjoyable and rewarding. Spanish always seems to be the subject that gets left behind, so I’m not sure if we will work that in or not.

As I always do, I’ll share what resources I’m using and what I discover along the way. And I’m planning on sharing an interesting post on food very soon, so stay tuned for that. Oh, and if you are a member of the bibleprinciples group then watch your inbox for a post on an exciting study coming up in May that Lisa H. and I are working on. Good stuff!

My mom gave me lots of BPA material. I’m not sure exactly where these notes came from, but they were good so I thought I’d share them here. This is full of Biblical Principles, although I didn’t take time to note them here. Feel free to leave a comment and share your own study with us.

How to Set Up Your Home for Learning

1. Attitude of approval–even when you correct, do it with approval.
2. Kids learn best where there is a single authority figure. Bonding is necessary. If there is no bonding, no learning will take place. If the child is not convinced of a person’s authority, they will not learn from that person.
3. Predictable environment. I believe that means to have a consistent schedule and place to work, whatever that means to your family.
4. Freedom to explore and manipulate their environment. Involvement is necessary for self-motivated learning. Learning is “answered curiosity.” In the final analysis, all learning is self-motivated.
5. Be careful to avoid over-stimulation, that is, too many things going on in the home while learning is taking place. It destroys the ability to concentrate and causes more mental confusion.
6. Initiatives and acheivement should be stressed. The value of achievement should be emphasized.
7. A clearly defined values system gives the child wisdom.
8. Teach the value of learning through reading.
9. Verbal exchanges between child and parent are important. Even a baby can remember words, they just can’t repeat them (subliminal learning).

According to the wisdom of Hebrew rabbis, the beginning of teaching a child is to study them for six months before you start.

The strong, structured family remains stable, no matter where you might move.

All Principle Approach teachers must create a notebook of their own. This is what we teach from, along with reference materials and original documents. I thought I’d share about mine in hopes that others will do the same.

My oldest is 7 1/2 and we are in our third year of home educating.
Here is what my notebook contains (in order):

At the front: my home educating constitution
my week-at-a-glance calendar listing all the subjects on one page
dividers for all subjects
In each divider I have my lesson plan pages (done a week on one page), 4-R work, notes and printouts, maps and other resources from my studies.

I keep all this in one 2.5 in. binder.

I have many notebooks already–two for literature, two for history and one for each of the others. I pull from those to put in my Teacher’s Notebook so I can have all the material I need quickly accessible. As we continue our studies I will eventually have lots of notebooks for each subject because I will have many years of study on each subject. As my body of knowledge grows, so will my notes (and my “wall of notebooks!”).

Eventually we will have a whole library of references, notes and materials we can draw from as we study together. I know kids who came home from college to get their notebooks on certain subjects because they were so thorough. I think that’s amazing and I look forward to that kind of work together as a family.

Because we don’t just fill notebooks, we fill our hearts and minds. The notebooks simply manifest all the work done on the inside.

I try to make my notebook as neat and complete as possible, as an example to my DD. I don’t compare my work to hers but I just let her see it and look through it, noting the clean pages, neat handwriting and the even margins. She can see the standard without being corrected and it helps her see what’s expected in a practical way.

I would love to hear how you organize your teaching materials. I know I still have a lot to learn.