John Hay (9)

As a homeschooling parent one of my highest goals for my children (after helping them come to a saving relationship with Christ) is to equip them with a biblical worldview. Most worldview materials are geared towards high school age students (and older), so I was very excited to learn of the release of a series of books from Apologia designed to foster a biblical worldview in children between the ages of 6 and 14.

Produced in collaboration with Summit Ministries, the first volume Who is God? And Can I Really Know Him? teaches children the basics of what worldview is and why it is important before delving into teaching children about basic, foundational truths of doctrine. Likening the development of a worldview to the building of a house (a Summit Ministries model), authors John Hay and David Webb stress that before even building the house, it needs to be built on a rock solid foundation – God. So, that’s where this book starts out.

Produced in Apologia’s trademark textbook style, it is a sturdy, handsome hardcover with full color pictures and lovely artwork. Each lesson is broken into chunks that serve various purposes. There are teaching sections, enrichment sections that share interesting/somewhat related information, story sections that help with illustrations and memorable events, notebooking suggestions – this is a very rich program. Though there are only ten lessons included – each of them can easily be done over a two-week period. There is a lot of meat here.

My only concern is that there is a little TOO much meat for the lower end of the recommended age range. Although there ARE coloring pages you can buy as a supplement to the course, younger children just aren’t developmentally ready to do the sort of comparing and contrasting that this course calls for. My husband and I were working through this course with our children (our oldest is 8), but it was all going over their heads for the most part. WE really enjoyed it, but I think it is really best as a study if your oldest is 12 or so.

The early logic stage, 12-14 would really benefit from this course, as well as older students without any worldview instruction. Our young children are more focused on the grammar stage, factual content that they can easily grasp and remember. Who, what, when, and how are their key learning concerns; when we ask them for more, they simply meltdown on us. Simple books of children’s doctrine better serve younger children. Not only were my children blown out of the water by the content, but the notebooking questions were also very high – these are definitely better for students of at LEAST 10. After moving through a couple of lessons with overwhelmed children we decided to put the course aside for now.

That being said, this is really a beautiful course. It is richly supported with additional free downloadables (there is a website address included inside of the book when you purchase it) and is filled with vitally important, God glorifying content. We are definitely holding onto our copy and will be coming back to it again once our children are ready – we are looking forward to it. If you have children between 10 and 14, I think you will find this a very profitable study for your family.

I received a physical copy of this title in exchange for this review. All opinions are genuine and entirely my own.

Reviewed at quiverfullfamily.com… (meer)