Do you want to combine grades to save some costs? Or are you striving for sanity while juggling multiple students? We have some tips for you in today’s FAQ! Hope: Our question for today is, “If I have a 5th grader, a 3rd grader, and a 1st grader, how can I combine my teaching? Is there any way to teach them all from the same curriculum or how can I do that?” Deb: We’re not just talking about those particular grades. We’re talking about what to do if you’re combining multiple children and multiple grades. What does that look like? And of...

For the sake of simplicity, throughout this blog post, we’ll refer to all home-based charter schools, home study divisions of public schools, etc. under the title of “Charter School.” In a nutshell, a charter school gets state funding for each child they have enrolled, just as a public school would. The charter schools we work with here at Timberdoodle pass on a chunk of the funding to you for curriculum purchases (orders usually have to be placed through them) and keep the rest of the funds to cover their overhead costs. Charter schools want you to sign up with them...

From the time our children could sit in our laps, family devotion was a mainstay in our home, so teaching Bible to our children was paramount. But for too many families the sum total of Bible instruction for their children is Bible workbooks that are little more than read-and-regurgitate exercises, and that alarms me. Yes, I did want children to know the facts of the Bible – who killed a giant with a small stone; who was thrown into a lion’s den; and who changed water into wine, and The Action Bible does a splendid job of that. But my experience has...

We pull from a wide range of resources, including numerous publishers and manufacturers, to create our curriculum kits. As a business owned by a Christian family, our faith and values are generally reflected in the curriculum choices we make, however not all of our material is explicitly Christian. We also include a number of resources from quality non-religious publishers as well. The areas that most tend to reflect a Christian perspective are much of the science, history, and some of the critical thinking skills, though you’ll find Christian influence in some other resources as well. You won’t see that as much...

There’s been a lot of buzz, discussion, and anxiety in the homeschool community for the last few years about the Common Core State Standards. Many of you have asked us what our stance is on the standards, and whether our curriculum is designed to comply with them. What is the Common Core?According to the CCSS website, “The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt.” Why Homeschoolers are ConcernedThere is some real concern in the...