How to Choose Apostolic Homeschool Curriculum

Faith Schooling Published 2026-07-16 Updated 2026-07-19

The short answer: there’s very little curriculum written from an Apostolic position, so waiting to find one mostly means not starting. The real skill is evaluating ordinary curriculum against Apostolic conviction — knowing which subjects carry a worldview and which don’t, checking the handful of places where doctrine actually shows up, and teaching the rest yourself. Buy for the teaching, not the label.

It’s a common pattern to spend months hunting for the perfect Christian package, then teach it without ever reading the three pages that say something you’d want to talk about. The good news is that this is a much smaller job than it looks — and this page is how to do it in an afternoon.

First, an honest disclosure

We sell curriculum. Faith Readers is our product, which means you should read this page the way you’d read anything written by someone with a stake in the answer.

So here’s our attempt to earn the read: the criteria below are the ones we’d use if we sold nothing. Several are criteria we don’t always win on, and we’ve said so. If this page ever starts reading like an argument for our own product, it has failed at the job it exists to do.

The category problem

Apostolic families face a real shortage, and it’s better named than worked around.

The Christian homeschool market is large, well-produced, and almost entirely evangelical or Reformed. Its Bible content will teach salvation, baptism, and the Godhead in a form that differs from what you believe — sometimes in a footnote, sometimes on the page. That’s not anyone acting in bad faith. It’s simply a market shaped by who’s in it.

That leaves three options, and two of them are good:

Use secular or neutral curriculum for subjects that don’t carry doctrine, and teach Bible and worldview yourself. Many experienced Apostolic families do exactly this, and it works well.
Use Christian curriculum with your eyes open — knowing the specific pages where it differs, and working through them with your child. Done on purpose, this is a feature: your child watches you handle a disagreement between believers graciously, with a Bible open. No curriculum contains that lesson.
Wait for perfect Apostolic curriculum. This one isn’t really an option — it’s a way of not starting.

Nothing you buy will do the doctrine for you — and once that lands, shopping gets much easier. You stop looking for a curriculum to be your child’s pastor and start looking for one that teaches fractions well. That’s a question you can actually answer.

Which subjects actually carry a worldview

This is the distinction that saves you months, and it’s the one most buying guides skip.

Subject	Worldview load	What it means for buying
Bible / doctrine	Total	You teach it. Check any purchased material line by line, or write it yourself.
History	Heavy	Whose story, going where, with whom at the center? Check hard.
Science (origins, human life)	Heavy at specific points	Check origins and human dignity. The rest — chemistry, physics, weather — is just science.
Literature	Moderate to heavy	Depends entirely on the reading list. Read the list.
Health / family life	Heavy	Check it. All of it.
Reading instruction	Low — it’s a method, not a message	Buy on effectiveness. See below.
Math	Essentially none	Buy the one that teaches best. A verse in the margin doesn’t make it Christian math.
Handwriting, spelling, grammar	None	Buy on quality.

Where the energy usually goes wrong: a great deal of it on finding “Christian math,” and very little on the history sequence — which is where the worldview actually lives. A verse printed above a page of long division is a nice touch, and it isn’t integration. Spend your attention where the worldview is. (See: How Christian Schools Integrate Faith Into Every Subject — the same test applies to what you buy.)

The doctrinal check — where to actually look

You cannot read every page before you buy. You don’t need to. Doctrine surfaces in predictable places. Go to these:

The publisher’s statement of faith. Usually online, usually specific. Read it before anything else. It tells you what the Bible material will assume.
The salvation material. Find the lesson that presents how a person is saved. Read that lesson. This is the single highest-value ten minutes in the entire evaluation.
Anything on baptism. Formula, mode, and whether it’s presented as symbolic or essential.
Anything on the Godhead. How is God’s nature described? This is where a direct difference is most likely, and it will usually be presented as settled rather than as one view among several — which is simply how curriculum is written.
The Holy Spirit material. Especially whether the gifts are presented as having ceased.
The history sequence’s treatment of the church. Which parts of church history are here, and which aren’t?
Origins, if it’s a science course.

Seven checks. One afternoon. That’s the whole job — and it’s a far better use of your time than three months of searching for a label.

And when you find a difference, that’s normal — and useful. You now know exactly which week of which year you’ll be teaching that lesson yourself. Put it on the plan. Then when you get there, teach it with your child watching: here’s what this book says, here’s what the Bible says, here’s why we believe differently, and here’s why these people are still our brothers and sisters. That’s worth more than a curriculum that never disagreed with you — and it’s a lesson you couldn’t buy.

Then check whether it actually teaches

Doctrine is the filter. Teaching quality is the purchase. A curriculum you’re doctrinally comfortable with that teaches poorly still costs your child a year — and the comfort won’t make that back.

Reading is where this matters most. Reading instruction is not a worldview — it’s a method, and methods differ enormously in how well they work. A program should teach the code explicitly and systematically: letter sounds, blending, and progressively harder patterns, in a deliberate order, with the child actually reading words made of what they’ve been taught.

The one thing to decline, whatever the cover says: any program that teaches children to guess a word from the picture, from the first letter, or from what would “make sense” in the sentence. That habit looks like reading for about two years — often until third grade — and then has to be undone, which is hard on a child. This is a question about the method, not about the publisher. (See: How to Teach Reading in a Christian Home.)

For everything else, ask:

Does it teach, or does it assign? A workbook that assumes you already know how to teach the subject is practice pages rather than curriculum. That’s perfectly fine when you know the subject — and a hard year when you don’t. Seventh-grade math is where this usually shows up.
How much prep per day, honestly? Not the catalog number. Ask a parent who has used it.
Can it survive a bad week? Everything works in September. What happens in February, when someone’s been sick and you’re three weeks behind? Curriculum that can’t be compressed tends to get abandoned.
Does it fit this child? The one who won’t sit still, or the one who reads ahead and gets bored.
Does it fit you? You’re the teacher. A program you dread is a program that quietly stops in October — and that’s the most predictive question on this list, even though it’s the one that gets asked least.

What to actually buy

For subjects with no worldview load — math, spelling, handwriting, most science: buy the thing that teaches best. Full stop.

For reading: buy on method. Explicit, systematic, no guessing. This is the one place where getting it wrong costs years.

For history and literature: read the sequence and the book list before you buy, not the marketing.

For Bible and doctrine: this is yours. Purchased material is a support at most, and the seven checks above apply to every page of it.

The mistakes

Buying the label instead of the product. “Christian” on the cover tells you the publisher’s market — not their doctrine, and not their teaching quality. Both are worth checking, and both are checkable.

Assuming Christian curriculum is doctrinally neutral. It’s the opposite, and that’s by design: it’s doctrinally full, taught with conviction. That’s a virtue in a curriculum — it just means the convictions are someone’s, and worth knowing before your child meets them.

Buying a whole grade from one publisher because it’s simpler. It is simpler. It also means that publisher’s weakest subject becomes your child’s whole year in that subject. Mixing takes more work and usually teaches better.

Buying for the child you wish you had. The beautiful, ambitious, literature-heavy program is wonderful — for a child who will sit and read for two hours. Buy for the child at your table.

Spending the year’s energy on the decision. Four months of research and a January start costs more than an adequate choice made in July. Adequate and started beats perfect and pending, every time — and you can always change it.

Expecting the curriculum to disciple. It teaches fractions, and a good one teaches them well. You do the discipling — which is freeing, because it means no purchase can get that part wrong. (See: How to Build an Apostolic Home That Disciples, Not Just Entertains.)

Your evaluation, in order

Read the publisher’s statement of faith.
Read their salvation lesson. Ten minutes, and the highest-value step here.
Check baptism, Godhead, Holy Spirit, church history, origins. One afternoon.
Write down every difference you found — those are the lessons you’ll teach yourself. Put them on the plan now rather than later.
Now evaluate the teaching. Does it teach or assign? What’s the real daily prep? Will it survive February?
For reading, check the method. Explicit and systematic, no guessing.
Ask a parent who has used it — not a review page. Ask what they’d change.
Buy something adequate and start. Six weeks of actually teaching it will tell you more than six more months of research — and you can change it. Families change curriculum mid-year all the time. It’s normal, and it isn’t failure.

The thing to remember

“And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children…”
Deuteronomy 6:6-7

You shall teach them. Not you shall select a vendor.

The curriculum is a tool in your hand. A good one makes a long year easier and a hard subject teachable, and that’s worth real money and real research. But no box you open in August is going to form your child’s convictions.

You are the curriculum. The rest is materials.

Compare what Faith Readers actually does — including where it doesn't fit.

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