Faith Schooling vs BJU Press for K–5 reading and math

Which one fits: the short answer

BJU Press sells full-grade K4–12 kits across every core subject, with optional Homeschool Hub video streaming or DVDs, priced per student. Faith Schooling is a K–5 publisher: one household membership covering reading, language arts, phonics, cursive and a growing math series, taught by the parent from scripts, with no science and no history.

Reviewers generally describe BJU Press as more analytical and less drill-heavy than the other large Christian textbook house. If you are choosing between those two, that is the real comparison and this page is not it. What follows compares BJU with something different in kind: a household license for half the subjects.

What each one is, and who does the teaching

BJU Press is conservative Protestant and academically traditional. Reading 1 correlates with Phonics and English 1, so the language-arts strand hangs together rather than arriving as three unrelated books. Teacher editions are classroom-sized; homeschool companions exist, and Distance Learning video puts a studio teacher in front of the child. Rebecca Devitt, who reviews both publishers, prefers BJU's shorter video lessons and lighter workload.

Neither publisher posts an official K–5 daily time. One parent on the Confessions of a Homeschooler forum described 5.5 to 6.5 hour days when using BJU fully — one household's report rather than a published figure, but a useful signal that the full kit across every subject is a full school day.

Faith Schooling is parent-taught with no video option. A complete reading lesson is scripted at 45 to 55 minutes, from a calm start and prayer through phoneme work, blending, decodable reading with narration, a timed drill, application and a spaced-review card box. Cursive is 10 to 15 minutes. The child's work is on paper throughout.

Side by side

BJU Press facts below were observed on the publisher's own site in August 2026, and the prices are per student rather than per household. Kits, tiers and prices change; check the publisher's current catalog before you decide anything on the strength of this table.

What each costs

Observed on BJU Press Homeschool's site on 26 August 2026: a K5 complete kit at $454.20 and a Grade 1 kit at $1,073.05. Those are per-student prices, so a second and third child in different grades are separate orders. Rebecca Devitt has separately cited video grade packages near $1,099 for 2026 — her published figure, not a catalog pull we verified ourselves.

Faith Schooling All Access is $39 a month, or $299 for the founding first year and $349 a year afterward, covering every K–5 program and the complete practice library for every child in one household. The honest offset is printing: student books, workbooks and practice pages arrive as files you print, so paper and toner move onto your side of the ledger.

What you can read before you spend anything

BJU Press does something most publishers do not, and it deserves the credit: free per-course Lesson Plan Overviews that list every lesson in the course. Combined with the scope-and-sequence PDF and sample pages, you can see the shape of a whole year before you order. That is more transparency than the category norm, and it is worth using.

Faith Schooling publishes the teaching rather than the plan. Every reading and phonics teaching guide can be read page by page in the browser before joining, and so can the complete first workbook of each phonics level. Add eight interior pages from every grade's student book, three open sheets in every practice set, and HARVEST placement, which is open to everyone.

Where the Bible sits in each program

Reviewers describe BJU's biblical worldview as woven through the lessons rather than confined to a verse in the margin, alongside Bible as its own graded subject. For a family that wants doctrine taught deliberately and academically, that is a real strength, and it comes attached to a path that runs from K4 to graduation.

Faith Schooling does not sell Bible as a graded subject at all. The Scripture is inside the reading week — a Bible hero as the text, a virtue as the theme, one memory verse quoted exactly from the New King James Version — and everything doctrinal is separated out into the Apostolic Academy, which costs nothing: Scripture memory, study guides, a ten-volume church history and family printables.

Pacing and screens

BJU's kits follow course lesson plans across a school year. That structure is why the Lesson Plan Overviews are useful, and also why a mid-year switch means either compressing or repeating. Cathy Duffy notes that families juggling several grades sometimes skip the large teacher editions, and lose the method along with them.

Faith Schooling advances a child on evidence: daily exit tickets, weekly mastery checks with parallel forms so a retest is not the same questions, timed drills with personal-best tracking, and a skill ledger. On screen load, BJU's video is optional and the written work stays on paper; Faith Schooling has no video at all, and its browser layer is for the parent.

Where BJU Press may fit your family better

Several of the things homeschool families most often want are things BJU Press has and Faith Schooling does not. Any one of them settles the question on its own, without a tiebreaker.

• You want every subject, including science and history, from one publisher across K4 to Grade 12.
• You want a video teacher. The Homeschool Hub and DVD courses let a studio teacher carry the lesson — reviewers particularly praise this for high school and for parents teaching several children at once.
• You need an accredited school. The Academy of Home Education enrolls students and keeps records; a publisher cannot.
• You want standardized testing from the same source. BJU sells Iowa and Stanford achievement tests.
• You prefer analytical, discussion-shaped lessons over drill. Reviewers consistently describe BJU as less rote than the traditional alternative.
• You are teaching past Grade 5, where Faith Schooling simply ends.

The limits on our side

The limits are worth stating flatly: Kindergarten through Grade 5, nothing outside reading, phonics, cursive and math, no video, no grading service, no enrollment, no accreditation. In math, Grades 3 to 5 currently have a student text without the matching practice workbook and teaching guide, and those grade pages say so on the page.

It is also not an Orton-Gillingham dyslexia intervention, and it does not claim to be. If a child has a diagnosed reading disability, specialist structured-literacy programs exist and are the honest recommendation. What Faith Schooling offers is a complete, scripted, Scripture-carrying reading sequence for the ordinary K–5 years.

How to decide this week

Work through these four in order before you spend anything. The comparison gets much easier once you have taught one real lesson from each.

1. Settle scope. If you need science and history in the same order, BJU Press is the cleaner buy.
2. Read BJU's free Lesson Plan Overview for the grade you are considering, and read a Faith Schooling teaching guide in full. Compare the actual teaching, not the catalog copy.
3. Run HARVEST placement and print the report, so the starting point is a skill rather than a birthday.
4. Count students. Per-student kits and one household membership scale in opposite directions.

HARVEST reading placement A day in the classroom