I am writing from the standpoint of someone who began a journey years ago with a longing to give my children a classical Christian education. When I began this journey, I did not really know what that looked like. Before I even began “homeschooling,” when my oldest daughter was 4, I wanted to work with her and expose her to stories of Christianity that were beautiful and inspiring, but I did not know where to find materials. I stumbled across a publication that I was able to subscribe to on a monthly basis that included stories, recipes, and crafts for children of different ages. I was struck by the fact that the history stories were not about Christians that lived during the last 200 years or more recently, but rather about Christians who lived long ago, such as St. Patrick, who lived just a few hundred years after Christ. I think I was longing for a specific “flavor” of beauty, a flavor I found as we read the stories and worked on the crafts. This publication does not seem to be in existence any longer, but as I began educating my oldest daughter at home, I began looking for materials that seemed to fit this pattern of truth and beauty and that included Christianity as part of history. I didn’t really know what it was called, because at this time, even most private and Catholic schools had ceased to be classical and had become fairly progressive.

I eventually chose Calvert School as my homeschool curriculum; I had known about Calvert School for a long time, as it had a well-established home education program that had been used by diplomats and missionaries back when homeschooling wasn’t a thing. We first used the 4th grade program and loved it. Calvert School was criticized by some as not being Christian, but the curriculum included many stories of Christians throughout history and presented the conversion of kings and emperors in a positive light. I had never been exposed to many of these stories and learned more than my daughter. The Calvert education satisfied my longing for an education that emphasized goodness, truth, and beauty. We learned about Greek columns (beautiful!), read beautiful poetry, and enjoyed many lovely stories from literature and history. I am grateful for the Calvert curriculum and continued to use different grades with different children. The Calvert manual itself provided an education in teaching and benefited me greatly.

As time went by, I began enjoying organizing and putting together my own curriculum, using products from different publishers or writing my own. The Calvert curriculum had given me the confidence to do that and had helped immensely with knowing how much time should be spent each day and on each subject. I scheduled our days so that we started every day at 9:00 AM and were done by noon or 1:00. There was no busywork and very little wasted time, so it was entirely possible to have a 3 – 4 hour day.

In future posts, I will tell more of my story and discuss things like scheduling and planning for different ages.