Homeschool Trial 2024-2025

Welcome

Greetings in Christ! Thank you for your interest in trialing the St. Boniface Lutheran homeschool plan for the 2024-2025 school year.

This plan is for a single, combined classroom consisting of grades 1-3. It does not include plans for Mathematics, Handwriting or Special Projects (to include Science) at this time. We recommend pre-2012 Saxon Math for Mathematics and Consistent Cursive for Handwriting. Our Science curriculum is still under development.

Everything you need is in this folder — the Calendar, Schedule, and Scope & Sequence (all in one spreadsheet; note tabs at bottom) and all texts and materials. You may wish to save this folder to your Google Drive and/or bookmark it in your browser. You may wish to copy and paste (paste-transpose to make one column for each day of the week) two weeks at a time from the Scope & Sequence into a separate spreadsheet of your own.

Parents and teachers may wish to obtain hard copies of certain items. Amazon, eBay, and Abebooks are good places to search. Barring that, you may wish to use a PDF printing and binding service (like this one from Home Innk Print). If nothing else, visit your local print shop print, get the PDFs printed and three-hole-punched, and put them in binders.

All school is memory work. Repetition is the mother of memory. This plan includes ample spaced repetition. You will find that you and your children will have quite a bit memorized by the end of the year even without any assigned “memory work.” You will learn the Catechism by reading it aloud over and over again. You will learn the daily prayer offices, canticles, and hymns by singing them over and over again.

The St. Boniface Lutheran School headmaster is available for consultation free of charge on a limited basis should you need clarification on anything or if you would like assistance with customizing the plan further to suit your family’s needs. Please reach out via email or via the Lutheran Teacher Telegram channel.

God’s blessings on your schooling.

In Christ,
Trent Demarest
Headmaster, St. Boniface & St. Sarah’s

Overview of Schedule and Subjects

1. McGuffey

If you are not familiar with the McGuffey Eclectic Readers, start here. If you don’t know where your child should begin, just go with the grade (e.g., First Grade = First Reader). Every lesson is to be read aloud with an adult. 

Texts & Materials

  • Eclectic Primer
  • Eclectic Readers 1-6
  • All written work can be done in a composition book.

2. Copywork

Suggestions and guidance will be announced via the blog and shared in the Drive folder as the school year gets underway.

3. Daily Office & Catechism

Matins is prayed every weekday and Vespers is prayed Friday afternoons. Families who wish to make more liberal use of these prayer offices (i.e., on the weekends as well) are encouraged to do as their piety suggests. When the New Testament is studied in Bible History (as is the case this year), the Scripture lessons for the daily office are taken from the Old Testament, and vice versa. The lesson pericopes are taken from “Lessons for Morning and Evening Throughout the Year,” found on pages 161-164 in The Lutheran Hymnal (1941), with each respective column (“morning” and “evening”) providing six lessons for the week, the first five of which will be read at Matins each morning with the sixth (Saturday) lesson read at Vespers on Friday. Feel free to deviate from this as much or as little as you see fit. The lessons are given on the Scope & Sequence sheet for your convenience.

The Small Catechism is drilled regularly within the context of the daily office. The Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer, and Creed are recited daily. The primary texts of the remaining chief parts (Holy Baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar, Confession/Office of the Keys) are drilled weekly.

Texts & Materials

  • The Holy Bible (a KJV and the Thomson Septuagint are available for your use)
  • The Lutheran Hymnal
  • A Short Explanation of Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism [a.k.a. Luther’s Small Catechism; N. B. that this is the 1943 edition] 
  • The restored Venite (text and audio) [N. B. this article on the bowdlerization of the Venite in Anglophone church usage since the eighteenth century]
  • Weekday Canticles
  • Audio tutorials and recordings of the offices in toto as well as the canticles and selected hymns will be made available as the school year gets underway.

4. Bible History

The scope and sequence of Advanced Bible History lessons reflects an average pace of two lessons per week with two intervening review days and Friday as an optional assessment day. The corresponding Bible stories from One Hundred Bible Stories have been indexed to the ABH lessons for those who might wish to keep their pre-school-aged children “on the same page.” Please note that Advanced Bible History is cross-referenced to Luther’s Small Catechism and The Lutheran Hymnal.

Texts & Materials

  • Advanced Bible History
  • One Hundred Bible Stories
  • All written work can be done in a composition book.
  • Supplemental materials may be made available as the school year gets underway.

5. Mathematics

On your own.

6. Grammar

Enough material is provided in each lesson of Reed & Kellogg’s Graded Lessons in English for four half-hour periods of instruction; therefore a pace of one lesson a week is suggested. Lessons 1 and 2 may be taught the first week. We recommend the basic pattern of using the half-hour after lunch for instruction and recitation and reserving the written exercises for Morning Work the following day.

Texts & Materials

  • Graded Lessons in English, by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
  • All written work can be done in a composition book.
  • Supplemental materials may be made available as the school year gets underway.

7. History

This year we will be trialing A Pictorial History of the World, Ancient and Modern, for the Use of Schools, by Samuel G. Goodrich. While this text is far from perfect (it is rather Whiggish in places), it has many qualities that make it preferable to contemporary children’s history textbooks, including those on offer from the purveyors of so-called “classical” curricula (e.g., the “Story of the World” series by Susan Wise Bauer). It is meant to be read as literature, and we encourage it to be regarded and enjoyed as such, with assignments and assessments kept to a minimum.

Texts & Materials

  • A Pictorial History of the World, Ancient and Modern, for the Use of Schools, by Samuel G. Goodrich
  • All written work can be done in a composition book.
  • Supplemental materials may be made available as the school year gets underway.

8. Literature

For Literature we suggest a rotation of Aesop’s Fables, Grimm’s Household Tales, and selected American folklore. The Scope & Sequence does not go into greater detail than the suggested schedule of rotations.

Texts & Materials

  • The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes
  • Aesop’s Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs
  • The United States of Storytelling: Folktales and True Stories from the Western States, by Dan Keding
  • All written work can be done in a composition book.
  • Supplemental materials may be made available as the school year gets underway.

9. Drawing

For those looking for guidance on elementary drawing instruction, we recommend working through the lessons in The Illustrated London Drawing-Book. We are unable to offer more detailed plans at this time.

Texts & Materials

  • The Illustrated London Drawing-Book, edited and arranged by Robert Scott Burn.
  • All work can be done using a regular #2 pencil, a ruler, and drawing paper.

10. Special Projects

On your own.