Welcome to our homeschool page!
We’re glad you’re here!

On this blog you’ll find many posts related to school-specific topics such as curriculum and methods we like and use. However, many of the posts on this site relate to our family’s journey through life-learning, and this doesn’t necessarily always relate to academic education. These kinds of whole-child, whole-heart posts can be found in the Reflections and Family Journal categories. There you’ll also get a glimpse of the things I’m learning as a wife, mother, and home educator.

Background

God placed it on our hearts many years ago that homeschooling was an ancient path He desired us to walk when we started considering what kind of education we wanted for our family. I was homeschooled up to 9th grade, when I began attending a private Christian school for the duration of my secondary education. Things are much different now than they used to be. For example, the internet has enabled hundreds of thousands of parents to educate their children effectively and efficiently, even if they do not know the first thing about teaching. I wholeheartedly love research, and what a thrill it has been over the years to read about the wonderful impact home education has on children for life. Information and help has never been so readily available. I remember my mom having to send away for tests and books when she taught my siblings and I at home in the 80s. Everything was done by correspondence, which was extremely slow and could often be frustrating as there was no instant access to chatting with curriculum advisers, blogs, homeschool forums, etc. I was also trained almost exclusively with textbooks and workbooks, which were the main materials available back then on the homeschooling frontier, and which were expensive and boring. Unfortunately, the retention rate I had after spending most of my schooling buried in them was lacking at best. I knew there had to be something better out there when I started teaching my children.

Spiritual Foundation of our Homeschool

Hubby has long had a vision for our family of claiming the Promised Land in our lives spiritually and physically.  It didn’t take long for us to come up with a name for our homeschool. To us, Hebron Heights Academy is a reminder that we have to fight to take the spiritual ground that is good for our family. The children of Israel did not just wander into the Promised Land accidentally. They had to fight the enemy, and God was on their side. They had to believe His promises despite being surrounded by giants in their land. We are extremely passionate about this calling God has given us. We are imperfect vessels, but that does not mean we cannot carry the mandate with His strength and the long-suffering patience Holy Spirit has with us!

Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

Since discovering I was pregnant with my first daughter, my heart was to find a new way to educate, one that didn’t rely exclusively on the dry textbooks that were my only option as a young student. I realized that whole, living books enabled subject matter to come alive in a real and lasting way. I really appreciate many of the methods outlined by Charlotte Mason, Dr. Ruth Beechick, and others who believe children’s minds are vastly capable of understanding deep truths. We base our learning around discussion, interacting with material in a variety of ways, using creativity as we explore, and keeping God’s Word as the foundation upon which we build everything else. We have a variety of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners in our house. As such, I have to be flexible with my methods, especially now that we are braving the homeschool-through-high-school frontier. I am thrilled to be able to have such a hands-on approach with my children. Homeschooling enables me to encourage them in their strengths and fill in the gaps of their weaknesses.

While we embrace many elements of Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophies, we also derive several of our methods from Christian Classical Education principles. These two things are not mutually exclusive, as I’ve found through many years of weaving them into our daily learning experience. The wonderful thing about home education is that we are free to use what works for us and discard what does not, and the benefits of an individualized education for our children are far-reaching.

Our smorgasbord of curriculum over the years has led us to a somewhat eclectic arrangement of books and learning resources. We started out with literature-heavy, Charlotte Mason-style curriculum from Sonlight for the early years. This gave our children a deep love for beautiful books and living stories, and particularly instilled in them a love for history. We have probably read through Story of the World from Well Trained Mind ten times by now! As the kids became more established students, we started to add in classical curriculum from Veritas Press and Classical Academic Press, particularly for Latin and deeper history study as well as literature and theology. We have sprinkled in some Master Books and also use Apologia and Novare for science, worldview, and a few upper level electives. Notgrass has been a fantastic resource for high school level government, economics, and world geography from a Christian perspective. The cornucopia of language arts has varied greatly over the years, but we have kept to the main foundational programs of All About Learning for reading and spelling in the early years and Institute for Excellence in Writing for composition from late elementary through high school. For mathematics, we have been on the hunt for many years for the perfect program that would work well for every student at every level and for every topic and learning style. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all program for math, but we have used Math U See for elementary and high school consumer math, and after trying several other programs, settled on Saxon with Shormann Math for middle school and high school. I have come full circle – my hatred of the Saxon math I used in school has been replaced with a grudging respect for its thoroughness despite the dry style. Not one of my students has perished from their daily drills.

All of the resources listed above have helped us completely redefine education for our family compared with what we had when we were growing up. We have embarked on a journey of lifelong learning, hoping to instill that love in our children.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever! Psalm 111:10