One of the Surprise Benefits to Homeschooling - VACATION!!

by Brenda Conyne

​My youngest daughter started homeschooling in 6th grade. We were totally clueless how to start or what to do. We wound up basing our entire curriculum on a recommendation for a math book.

We heard that the BJU Press math curriculum was wonderful, so we decided to do that. After reading the BJU Press catalog, we liked their philosophy for 2 other classes which made it cheaper just to buy the entire curriculum. We thought we would try that the first year and supplement if we did not like some of the classes.

Fortunately, we liked all of the classes (although we didn’t use the history curriculum due to other strong recommendations). For my daughter’s reading class, we LOVED the teacher who made every single thing so interesting. Somewhere along the line the teacher talked about an Easter program at Bob Jones University, The Living Gallery, and we decided to take a trip and include that in the visit.

We were NOT disappointed; the presentation was incredible.  The idea was to take classic, historical art and reproduce it, life size, using people. They did nifty things with the lights when everyone was in place, and the people were magically transformed into paintings. All this was done to beautiful, inspirational music.

​As a bonus we toured the campus—my daughter’s favorite part was the library because we had “visited” it in her video lessons. But the BEST part was when we visited the BJU Press and got to see how and where the videos were made, including a giant warehouse of props, and my daughter got to meet most of her teachers! 

We made this a 5-day trip for other explorations as well. There were two days at different beaches, a lighthouse tour (she became interested in lighthouses from both her science and math teachers), staying in a quaint, old, southern town, visiting a beautiful park with gardens so different from anything we would see in New Mexico, and eating all kinds of yummy things we don’t have in New Mexico, either.

​We didn’t know what we were doing that first year of homeschooling at all, but we decided to make it enriching and fun. We are excited about the opportunities we have already had and more that will come because we have the flexibility of home schooling. We didn’t start because of flexibility, but it would be difficult to give that up now!

Brenda Conyne

Brenda is a wife, mom and volunteer.