We’ve experienced it. We had embraced family-style homeschooling for several years when our eldest son entered high school. Suddenly, our family felt pulled in different directions.
A large reason we started homeschooling was for family togetherness, and yet we witnessed unity and connection disintegrating right in front of us. At that time, we re-evaluated our educational choices and made changes to regain ownership of his course of study and pursue our vision for a one-room schoolhouse approach in our home. Our hope and desire has been to help others do the same.
This website did not start as a business but as a place to share with my husband what our family was doing when he was working offshore Tanzania (East Africa) and, later, offshore Brazil. Over time, this website grew into a ministry which we supported with our own finances until he lost his job in 2016. We were at a crossroads. We either needed to shut it down due to the expenses associated with it (this website incurs many fees just for existing because we’ve never opted to load it down with pop-up ads), or we had to go all-in and transform it into a means for our family while continuing to serve homeschool families across the world. We chose the latter and have been glad to serve families through this website and our small family-run business for six years now. We hope to continue this effort but have been greatly impacted by the depressed economy. We are just a mom-and-pop shop (literally) and have never had goals of growing into a large business. This year, my husband took on a part-time job as a school bus driver to offset the lack of sales while still also helping with customer service and shipping/receiving. We’re doing all we can to continue this website. But, honestly, due to economic factors, we are at a crossroads once again. The thought has occurred to us: Will our business and thus this website survive, or will we have to close it all down to pursue other means? It means very much to us (and to the future of this website) when you share about this website via social media, when you recommend our products word-of-mouth, when you use our affiliate links, when you make purchases from our store. To those who have supported us in these ways, we are wholeheartedly thankful for you! Without your involvement, the rest of this website could not exist.
Almost everything in our shop is related to one of three things: our Script-n-Scribe penmanship curriculum, our K-8 Mission Great Commission program, and our Truth Trek High School Lesson Plans. We have researched and invested in a significant amount of curriculum and have dedicated a significant amount of time in developing these programs. For every book or curriculum recommendation we’ve incorporated into Mission World Wonders, Mission Faith Forgers, Mission Lasting Liberty, or Truth Trek, we’ve researched at least ten others. We chose our favorite books, wrote plans for our own family, and offered those plans to other families as a way to continue investing the time and finances to continuing the maintenance of this massive website. Each program we have developed was meant to solve a problem we encountered within our own homeschooling experience. We want to combat the disintegration of family ties, the disjointed disconnections, and the lack of unity that has become a trend even among Christian homeschooling families.
In Mission Great Commission, we pieced together a plan that integrates as many topics/subjects as possible using our favorite resources (over the course of many years of homeschooling). This program was meant to save families money and time in the process of homeschooling multiple children. Families could purchase one bundle of books to work through history, geography, art, music, science, and missions/Bible together during a one-hour family morning time and make meaningful connections in the process. Then, in three years, they could revisit that same package of resources to layer the learning more deeply. Each of the three plans in our Mission Great Commission curriculum series was built upon a framework of world missions because 1) we could learn much from those who have gone before us, and 2) the Great Commission is a vital component of the Christian walk.
In Truth Trek, we wanted to simply help families continue homeschooling through high school by providing a schedule to follow. We wanted to encourage accountability and discussion/connection between parents and students as they work through a Christ-centered, Biblically-based course of study. Our aim is to provide a means of unified learning as high schoolers build upon concepts that are covered in the family morning time offered in Mission Great Commission. This is a long-term vision that is still under development, but the first two years have been completed.
And our Script-n-Scribe program was designed simply to help our children learn to write while incorporating picture study and poetry (things of beauty) into our school days. I designed Letter Connector because our second-eldest son needed an intermediate step to transition from learning individual letters (in introductory cursive programs) to other copywork books that jump to words and sentences. When our third son came along, I had started diving into research regarding handwriting. At the time, we were using another program that I ended up re-ordering, editing with upstrokes, and adding additional content until I finally decided to just design a program for him which later became The Roller Coaster Writer. Truth Traveler, Hymns in History, and Americana were designed simply because I always intended to incorporate poetry and picture study into our days, but we never seemed to get around to it. It was a simple fix.
For the past six years, we’ve operated as distributors for the books and resources called for in our Mission Great Commission curriculum plans. We are currently continuing to carry physical copies of these resources. However, due to increased expenses, we do plan to gradually discontinue selling physical copies of books which accompany our Teacher Guides. The prices keep going up, and although we attempt to provide these resources at a discount for you, we are struggling to compete with Amazon, Christian Book, and eBay. When we sell out of physical books in our store, we will provide links to the proper editions of each book so you can purchase them from other websites. (We plan to continue operating this website for many years to come, Lord willing. It does depend on whether the means uphold the expenses, so your purchases from our shop and through our affiliate links (and your word-of-mouth recommendations to others) matter so much in the life of our business and this website! Thank you for supporting us in this way!)
We just wanted to give you an honest update. We truly hope we have served homeschool families well over the years, and we truly hope we can continue doing so in the years to come. For now, we will continue to move forward with this website and business. Thank you so much for your continued support.