Latest News - Family Life

Our CEB team has met a fair amount of homeschoolers who recoil a little at the thought of using workbooks in their homeschool. We get it, who wants to replicate the schools with their repetitive worksheets when we have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give our children a rich, engaging, and living education? What if we...

Getting Started Making the decision to homeschool is often the most difficult part of the entire process. Once you’re in, you’ll want to set a firm foundation with these highly recommended books. It can be challenging to see beyond the traditional school model, but these books will help you cast a vision and give you...

We’ve pulled together a great stack of March read-alouds for you and your family. Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland recounts the life of Saint Patrick. Through beautiful illustrations and simple storytelling, the book follows the journey of Saint Patrick from his youth in Britain to his kidnapping by Irish raiders, his years as a slave,...

    Many children are reading independently by the intermediate years. With my oldest two, it didn’t occur to me to keep reading to them once they were flying solo. My job seemed complete; the skill of reading and the habit of reading were set. It was natural to read books aloud to the following two...

So many options, so little time, and a limited budget! How should a family go about deciding where to invest their limited time, money, and energy when it comes to extra-curricular activities? Talk to any team sports coach and they will be able to list off all the reasons why team sports are the investment you should make....

Some Confusion A simple and universal definition is not so easy to come by and the confusion seems to enter with the higher-level chapter books. Where is the cut-off? At what point is a book considered a novel? And does it even matter? Early Reader Books, Chapter Books and Intermediate/Middle-Grade Novels are all designed with...

Invite your children to co-author a story! Literacy involves much more than reading words on a page and wordless books are an often overlooked tool in the literacy toolbox. Have you been overlooking them? I have! “Reading” wordless books increases vocabulary. Your children have two sets of vocabulary: one they can understand when they hear...

I hope you’ve had a year that was full of contentment, productivity, and times where you knew that God’s grace was upon you. I pray that you will be determined and purposeful to find time to sit with God’s word in your lap and soak in the details of the very first Christmas. Because this...

As I’ve entered my 10th year homeschooling this Fall, I wanted to send some encouragement your way to those of you who are just starting out, or who have only been homeschooling for a short while. Homeschooling families often experience wells of internal pressure, wondering, “how will we complete all of this?” The pressure can...

Welcome and Happy Grandparents Day (September 12th) to all the grandparents of homeschoolers. You have an opportunity to be a treasured resource to your adult children and their children. Keep reading to find out how. Almost 20 years ago, I was listening to a radio broadcast on Christian radio and heard the host describe a...

I’m just going to get this out of the way first thing: I loved using this curriculum! It made it easy to have a deep and rich history experience with my kids using literature – my preferred method of teaching. Teach without a Textbook I had never heard of Beautiful Feet Books curriculum or their...

Everyone needs to define for themselves what a successful homeschool morning includes and in my experience, the definition can vary with each season of life. I had a different standard during my night-time nursing years than I do now with a seven-year-old as my youngest. As you are pondering what a successful morning looks like,...