Before I dive in, I want to respond to some of the comments that were on facebook when I announced I was going to make a big announcement. For those of you who didn’t see them, I was posting pictures of a book. And for a lot of you, this will be more than you imagined. 🙂
1. I had intended to only announce what I had been working on when I announced I had an announcement. The beginnings are ready, but the rest are in the works. So a warning to those SOOOOO excited about this, you may have to be a little patient for what you want.
2. I’m not going to sell out of books. I am publishing them for free through Amazon.com’s Create Space. You will be buying them from Amazon. They won’t run out. They also get most of the money from the sales and set the base price of the book. Which leads me to…
3. I’m not going to “make a fortune.” I will get a royalty from each book. Some proceeds will go to scholarships. I’m committed to EP being free. If you need these books because you don’t have internet at home or one computer and ten kids and can’t afford the books, there’s a book request form.
4. This isn’t turning into a business. I had no business plan of starting to sell books. This had never been my intention! (story below) This is still a ministry. Please don’t assume I’m making all this money and don’t need donations. Donations cover all my costs and are an encouragement to me.
Okay, ready???
In August I got to spend some extra time in fasting and in focused prayer and Bible study. This is one of the things that came out of that time. The Lord gave me a new direction for EP, and it’s offline. EP online isn’t going anywhere! No one start to sweat! I have five kids using it and another future EP user.
The first part of going offline is creating readers. That’s what you’ve been seeing pictures of on facebook. The readers are the reading curriculum in 100% offline form. Most of the reading curriculum is made up of public domain books. They can be republished. The books contain the 180 days of assignments and right there with each assignment is the reading for that day. (No more “Stop in the middle of page…”)
For vocabulary, where there was a matching game online, I made a matching activity in the book. Where there was a multiple choice game, I put in a multiple choice activity. I put in the directions to write your answers on a separate paper. No need to write on a few pages of huge book. (This brings up that I’ve asked a family that makes a lot of puzzle books through Amazon’s Create Space and who gives EP free access to their test-making website to make a workbook that would have all of those activities in it for those who want to have their kids write directly on the page.)
Later in the book when they do the same thing for review, I tell them they can either do the vocabulary review game online or go to Day ___ to review their words and send them to the matching activity or whatever. They would be using the Review Games page on the site if they did that. This way I keep it offline, but you still can do some of the more fun things online if you choose.
And yes, there are answers. All of the answers to those activities and all of the answers to the reading comprehension questions are in the back of the book listed by day number.
You will find changes to the reading courses in the readers. Sometimes there was a lesson or activity instead of a reading. I decided to replace all of those with offline lessons and activities. There are actually very few lessons, like rhyming and rhythm in poetry or antonyms and synonyms in vocabulary. Those were replaced in the books with similar things; I put in little lessons and activities, so your child’s not missing out on any learning by using the readers.
Some changes in the readers (as opposed to the online reading curriculum) come from the fact that not every reading is from the public domain, and I can’t publish them. New readings were chosen as replacements. I tried to keep things as similar to the online course as I could since you might be pairing this book with the online language arts course of the same level. Please don’t think you are missing anything important by using the books; you can think of it as getting bonus materials. 🙂
The store is mostly things “coming” but the EP First Reader is ready for sale. I will do a separate post on Monday specifically about the EP First Reader.
If you are wanting more offline materials, read on, but first I want to tell you what I don’t think it’s going to involve. I have no intention at this point of doing all the courses completely offline. EP was created as an online curriculum and every day there are online activities that can’t be reproduced. Reading lends itself to book format and I thought it was probably the most time consuming thing done on the computer, so this will ease the computer time for families. [outdated: Also, I could never make a book of all the printables from the courses because I don’t own them. They aren’t mine to sell or even to give away. That’s why I have to point you to their sites instead of just giving you all the worksheets all together for a course. ] (NOTE: We have been making our own printables so that we can make workbooks of all the worksheets in the courses.)
There is another part to going offline that’s not ready, but I’m ready to announce that I’m working on it. I put this info on our new store page as well. Introducing…
The Genesis Curriculum
Coming 2015
This is a 100% offline curriculum covering science, social studies, language arts, Bible and foreign language (with learning Hebrew). All lessons are based off of the book of Genesis.
This is intended to be used as a “one-room schoolhouse” approach with everyone gathering around and learning together with mom (or other homeschool teacher) guiding the completely prepared lesson. This will be accompanied by one workbook for each child that will have all of their work for the year. There’s no daily busywork, but there are grammar, vocabulary, and spelling activities as well as science and social studies assessments that will be completed in their workbook.
Daily lessons include reading a portion of Genesis, practicing a weekly memory verse, doing a dictation for handwriting if desired, writing spelling words from one of the day’s verses, learning a vocabulary word from the day’s Scripture, learning a Hebrew word or practicing verses in Hebrew, covering a science and then social studies topic inspired by the reading from Genesis, a discussion question and finally writing.
[My intention is to make this 180 days; we’ll see. I think there will be additional years of this created. I’m doing these lessons now with kids ages 6-12.] (Note: There are four years of this curriculum, which puts history and science offline.)