Catholic Home School Books

by Mary
(Kansas, USA)

When we first home schooled our children sixteen years ago there were not so many Catholic home school books available as there are now. There were not NEAR as many technological helps as with Catholic audio books, Math DVDs, video flash cards (never spill the box again?!), and Internet sites with great information.

In the course of the first two to four years we had made up our minds that we wanted only real Catholic books, but found that so many of the supposedly Catholic books and Catholic textbooks had bad attitudes, non-Catholic philosophies, or simply omitted the Catholic symbols that help to hand the Catholic Faith to our children. As a matter of fact, we were learning much of the Catholic Faith as we studied to teach the children because the schools we had gone to did not teach it well.

One still has to be careful that the books teach the Faith well, but NOW there are so many much better resources and Catholic home school book companies that it is much easier to choose good books. We understand why the Catholic home school curriculum and teachers had marked only certain exercises and left others out! That short cut alone is worth the price of a home school curriculum especially in the beginning!

Mrs. Laura Berquist's book has excellent ideas for using Catholic books instead of text books to teach the different subjects. In this way you can decide which knowledge you want your children to have, find the books that teach that knowledge well, and then order them from the Catholic book store of your choice. The curriculum that she recommends is used at Mother of Divine Grace School and the books are sold at Emmanuel Books.

Catholic home school curriculum providers like Seton Homeschool, Our Lady of Victory School, Kolbe Academy and Catholic Heritage Curriculum offer many great ideas, too. We really like the Saxon Homeschool sets, Dr. Shoremann's DIVE to go with them, the copybooks for handwriting and history, and the adventure books that teach the Catholic Faith, history or science.

We are grateful to Emmanuel Books, Aquinas and More, and Adoremus Books
for carrying the Catholic home school books as published by Tan Books and Neumann Press and as written by such as Mrs. Laura Berquist and Mrs. Mary Kay Clark so that the information is easier to find than it was fifteen to twenty years ago!