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ABOUT US

First, just a little about ourselves. We are the Weber family, and we live and work as missionaries in a remote location in Africa. Living abroad as a missionary family has really given us a keen interest in countries and cultures around the world, and a love for travel and adventure. We are also a homeschool family, so everything that you see on this website is all just part of our homeschool social studies and geography program.

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WHAT WE BELIEVE
I think it is important to point out that our family comes from a Protestant Christian background, and in both our life and work we have a strong desire to see unity in the Church, which makes us a lot less about labels and denominations and a lot more about living out the truths in Scripture as followers of Jesus.
 

We believe that the whole of the Scriptures are the very words of God, “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). As this relates to history, we believe that the Bible is reliable and historically accurate. So in all our studies of history, we always go back to the Bible and use it as our reference point for determining how all of history ties together. 
 

With all this in mind, I think it is important to share with you the fact that what we teach, and how we teach it (right down to the choices we’ve made regarding what resources we use and share on this website) all center around our core beliefs about the Bible and our savior, Jesus Christ. 

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THE CONTENT

As you explore this website you will find links to many youtube videos, or other websites. There are many resources that I developed on my own and share on the site, but the majority of the content are ideas and resources that I have gathered from other sources. This being the case, I can’t guarantee that there won’t be some youtube advertisements, or ads on other websites that may be inappropriate for children, so please use discretion and consider previewing content on your own before showing it to your kids. 

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Personally, I prefer to do our schooling completely offline with the kids, and just take the time to download what I need ahead of time so that there isn’t any concern about what might pop up unexpectedly on the screen when we’re online. 

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Even all the online videos that you will see links for are all videos that I found online, but I always download them first, before showing them to my children. KeepStreams Video Downloader is my software of choice for downloading content. It isn't free, but I think it is worth the cost for my kids to be able to watch content offline, free of ads, pop-ups, and other distractions or concerns that come with giving your students access to the internet. 

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Aside from that, I also wanted to point out that I have tried VERY HARD to filter through all the resources on this website to make sure that they appropriate for children. I have even gone so far as to edit and censor certain videos to take out content that I did not want my children exposed to. 

That being the case, you SHOULD be able to use any of the resources on this website without having to worry about there being any swear words, fowl language, any LGBT content or other hidden agendas, or any “dark” content (witches, ghosts, wizards, sorcery, black magic, etc).

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I should also mention that there are several resources that mention evolution. In our home we believe the Bible and what it says about God creating the world, so we do not believe in evolution, and I have done by best to keep any evolution based content to a minimum. However, there are resources we use that are coming from secular sources, which has made it difficult to completely avoid the mention of evolution, though we have done our best to keep it at a minimum. 

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HOW WE DEAL WITH EVOLUTIONARY CONTENT
As I mentioned in the last section, I have not been able to completely filter out evolutionary content in the resources that we share on this website, but I have done my best to keep it to a minimum.  I have even gone so far as to edit videos that I downloaded from the internet to take out the bulk of the evolutionary content, when possible.

 

But even though I have tried to keep evolutionary teaching to a minimum, I do like having small amounts of it come up from time to time in our classroom, since I find it to be a good teaching opportunity, and you will certainly see notes and content in the lessons that directly address the teachings of evolution.

 

The truth is, the teachings of evolution are everywhere, and our kids are going to be bombarded with evolution-based ideas all throughout their lives, so, this being the case, I do intentionally allow a little bit of evolution here and there, and use them as teaching opportunities. 

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In everything that we do in school (books, videos, activities), I am always right there doing it right alongside my children, so whenever there is a mention of evolution or “millions of years”, I always take a moment to pause and talk about it with my kids.

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We also do a lot of Scripture based science and Bible learning that really helps to give them a good foundation for Creation science. So with all the things that they have learned about Creation and Christian science, along with my intentionality about talking to them about evolution whenever it comes up, I have actually found that my kids are getting really good at catching false teachings themselves, and many times they will point out the evolutionary content even before I do. In this way, they are learning how to identify it and how to respond to it.

 

NEEDED SUPPLIES
There is a lot of flexibility in how you can teach this program, so a lot of supplies you’ll need will depend on what all you decide to do. But if you are really wanting to get the most out of this program, and follow the same kind of model that we are doing, then you might want to consider having on hand these following items:

 

Printer. A lot of the resources we use are ones that we download and print. So being able to print things off at home has been really helpful. 

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Laminator. Having a laminator has been a real game changer for our homeschool. Whether it’s making flash cards, reusable dry-erase worksheets, or icons for our timeline, a laminator sure comes in handy for a lot of different activities.

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Pretend Play Passports and Country Flag Stickers. We like to use the SJPrinter Little Passports for Kids. Each of the kids has their own pretend passport, and we put their name and picture on the inside cover. Whenever we pretend to travel to a new country, they get out their passports and get to put in the flag sticker for that country, pretending that the sticker is their visa to let them travel to that location.

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Binder with Plastic Sleeves. I like to use the presentation style binders that have the plastic sheet protectors attached (like these!), but you could use any style of binder with sheet protectors. We use them as our “travel books”, so each of the kids has their own travel book, and every time we pretend to travel to a new country they add a country profile page to their travel books, and when we’ve finished learning about a country they create a simple “scrapbook page” to the book.

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HOW TO USE THIS WEBSITE

I have tried to design this website to be as easy to use as possible. Each continent and country has links to resources, including books, videos, arts and crafts, and more! Each country and continent is taught completely independent of all the others, so you can start on any country you want, and go in any order you want. 

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In our classroom, we typically begin our geography class by putting a sticker in our passports and listening to song, "All Around the World", while pretending to fly in an imaginary airplane to the country we have chosen to learn about. Once we have "arrived" in that country, we do a scavenger hunt that features that country, as well as creating our scrapbook pages for that country.​ We typically take about 3-4 days to learn about each country, using the resources listed on the webpage.

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DON’T FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING

My goal, in developing this website, has been to provide something for everyone, so that no matter what your style of teaching, there should be resources you can use. But with this “something for everyone” collection of resources, you should never feel like you need to do EVERYTHING. In our classroom, we just watch whatever movies are of interest, do whatever activities appeal to us, and when the excitement wears down, we close up the study and move on to the next.

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We have even been known to visit a country more than once! We have virtually traveled to China, Italy, and Australia a couple times now, and each time we do a review of some of the things we did before, but also some new things we didn’t have time to do the first time we pretended to travel there.

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In some ways I think it is better to travel to a country more than once, rather than trying to pack it all into a single class. Especially if you are working with young children, or mixed ages. Attention spans can be short for younger kids, and the repetition of traveling to a country multiple times can really help them remember the experience and the things they learned.

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