As we are hard at work on the new products and guide changes in 2025, I wanted to share a bit about my thinking behind these changes.
First, I’ll give you a little background. We have had the privilege of using the HOD guides with our own 4 boys from preschool through high school. What a journey it has been! My sweet sister Julie, has also used the HOD guides with her 3 boys all the way through as well. 
Along the way, we got to experience the guides with our boys’ differing personalities, strengths, levels of diligence, aptitudes, giftings, and areas of challenge. We have moved through the guides in sickness and in health, and learned so much along the way! We have learned to pray to finish the race the Lord set before us and felt joy as our older kiddos graduated from college. We now see our youngest sons graduating from high school and our middle sons excelling in college studies. The boys are all incredibly different, even though they had the same education. To us that is what makes HOD special! But more importantly the boys all know and love the Lord. To us that is ultimately what the privilege of teaching our boys at home has been about!
Having a a public school teaching background for my first 11 years, coupled with a homeschool educating background now for over 25 years, I have learned so many valuable lessons. Additionally, through my master’s in education program to be a principal, I tried so many strategies and methods. HOD is a unique blending of those years of fine-tuning what I believe about education and with the wisdom that comes with decades of trying various strategies and methods of educating children.
As we look at the additions and changes being made to the guides, we are seeking to offer families the benefit that comes from thoughtful reflection. Between my sister, Julie, and I, we have used the line of Heart of Dakota guides 7 times all the way through. We have done what is written in those guides fully. By reflecting through both a teaching and parenting lens, we can step back and see ways the guides could be even better. These changes reflect those sentiments.
In the younger years, you will notice we are moving toward more of a living books education. When I originally wrote our younger guides, we wanted streamlined programs that were focused on solid academics with short lessons, yet were hands-on and rich with character-building and the Bible. These goals still remain and are so important! However, in our own home during those years, our children’s days were also filled with living books. We read those books to our kiddos at naptime and at bedtime. Our boys poured over living history picture books too. The younger guides as originally written didn’t reflect that aspect of our day. The new “Visual History” Sets we are adding to the younger guides are a way to bring the living books experience we had in our homes into your homes too! These books bring the history study to life!
The Storytime in LHFHG was also an area that we wanted to update to reflect the wonderful books we read to our kiddos when they were in Kindergarten and First Grade. The new Storytime Set in LHFHG is a reflection of those great books! The books in the new Storytime Set have stood the test of time, and we have wonderful memories of reading them to our boys!
Now you can share those great books with your kiddos too. Since the Thornton Burgess books did such a great job of teaching needed language arts skills, keeping those books and lessons in LHFHG made sense as they teach different skills. Copywork is another area of challenge where we want to help parents and children excel. Our own boys had varying attitudes and levels of enthusiasm or dislike for copywork. We had 5 year olds who loved to write and could copy long poems daily and others who cried if they had to copy one letter a day! To aid the parent in how much copywork to require daily in the younger years, and how to steadily move children toward writing on lined paper, we are developing copywork aids like Copy the Classics and our new Scripture Copywork notebook. These notebooks work alongside the existing guides and help make copywork more independent.
Scripture memorization is another area where we are coming alongside the children to make Scripture memorization easier.
Our Scripture Cards help kiddos picture the verse in their minds, recite it, and then check to see if they have remembered it correctly. The cards are designed to match the version(s) used within the music or Bible study book they pair with in each guide, making these cards a great memorization tool. Bible was another area we wanted to update in LHFHG, Preparing Hearts, and MTMM. At the time these guides were first written, the Bible Study in MTMM was the best option we could find. Yet, over the years, as new resources for Bible have become available there are better options now. The new Bible Study in MTMM is a heartfelt study of Mark that will help students know and love Jesus at a critical time in their lives. Combined with the Really Radical Book for Kids, the study of Mark in the Best News Ever is a more appropriate option for the age of the students in MTMM. The same is true for Preparing Hearts for His Glory. The poetic retelling of Pilgrim's Progress and The Long Road Home are very age-appropriate and outstanding books for the age of students in Preparing Hearts. Sometimes parents skip the Bible box in Preparing Hearts and miss out on this important aspect of their child's schooling. These new resources are too good to skip!
Last, the devotional update in LHFHG is an amazing new resource your young ones will love. The Magnificent Names of Jesus matches the history and Bible in LHFHG so well! It is a beautiful book that will help your little learners celebrate the many names of our magnificent Saviour! Poetry and Nature Journaling are two other areas that we are working to make more accessible to parents and students. We love the poetry and nature studies in our guides and want to be sure these areas are easy to do during the homeschool day. Aids such as Paint Like a Poet, Paint Nature's Palette (along with their corresponding painting kits), and Copy the Classics make poetry and nature study easier to include in your day.
Subjects that used to be a challenge to incorporate such as Map Trek in RTR, Rev2Rev, and MTMM, the Inventor Study in Rev2Rev, A Child's Geography in CTC and RTR, as well as the Composer Study and State Study in Rev2Rev have been updated or rewritten entirely to make those studies more enjoyable and easier to implement.
Our writing programs have also gotten an overhaul, reflecting better options for writing that are now available. Writing & Rhetoric, Writers Roundup and Writers Gold Mine, Imitation in Writing: Fairy Tales, and Mastering the 5-Paragraph Essay work very well with the balance of writing within our guides and bring a welcome update to the area of writing.
Math is another area that has received a tremendous update. Adding Math with Confidence and Apologia Math to the younger years is a huge blessing! While I continue to love Singapore Math, and used it with my boys, I spent so many years looking for another good math option we could offer to families who wanted something other than Singapore Math. When Math with Confidence and Apologia Math arrived on the scene, I knew these were the programs I had been searching for! Updates to the middle school and high school math options were also much needed and very welcome!
In the area of reading, new phonics options for the youngest learners was also something that I had spent years searching to find. When we found Learn to Read Activity Book, Real Phonics, and Miss Rhonda's Readers, I knew that was just what our littlest learners needed. For students with dyslexia or reading challenges, Learn to Read for Kids with Dyslexia and Blast Off to Reading are wonderful programs to target those readers' specific needs. To ease the transition for emerging readers, I also knew a second Emerging Reader's Set was something I really wanted to put together. Our Emerging Readers: Set 1 has already been a blessing to so many readers, so our Emerging Reader's Set 2 was a natural next step. This set makes the step up into Drawn into the Heart of Reading much easier for students.
Creating new Boy and Girl Book Sets for Level 3/4 as students transition into Drawn into the Heart of Reading also was a needed next step. These books sets move students from the ER2 into more independent reading seamlessly, while delaying heavier written work in reading until they are a little older. Science in the younger elementary guides is another area where we are making some changes. In the first editions of our early elementary guides, we wanted the science to be living and to be able to be done without any extra supplies. We wanted to be sure there was plenty of copywork and lab forms and that the readings were enough. Not knowing then whether I would be writing future guides, we didn’t have the luxury of seeing what the plan would be all the way through high school. Knowing what we know now, we can see that the jump up in both Bigger Hearts and CTC science is bigger than we would like it to be for the typical age-ranges in those guides. The new science selections and follow-ups are more age appropriate both in reading level and written work, while still retaining the living, Charlotte Mason-style focus. Bigger Hearts science is also moving toward a hybrid approach where parent read-alouds alternate with independent student readings.
Wonderful new living science books have come out since the science in our guides were first written, and we are very excited to use them. Not only are they written in a living way, but they are also very visually appealing - which is a wonderful bonus for the early elementary years!
With the notebooking we already do for history, we are also moving away from similar-style notebooking in science. Instead, we are moving toward using a variety of equally effective follow-ups in science. Memorable graphic organizers, nature drawing, and oral narrations will help kiddos visualize and remember what they read. These activities will also be more time conscious in the day-to-day. The corresponding science kits from Creature Crew that we are scheduling in Bigger Hearts and CTC will also put the joy and wonder back into science. As kiddos use these kits, they will utilize activities written for a variety of learning styles to help them connect with what they’ve read. The new science sets will also make the transition into Bigger Hearts and CTC smoother, as both these guides currently have a pretty big step-up from the previous guides. I know my boys have been pouring over the new kits with excitement and enthusiasm in our warehouse already. They keep sharing how much they would've loved doing science this way!
We pray these new updates to the guides may be a blessing to you and your families! We are blessed to be able to retain so much of what has made HOD a solid curriculum for so many years, yet implement changes that come from years of reflection of ways to make the guides even better!
Thanks for sharing the homeschool journey with us! It is a privilege to serve you.
Carrie