We educated our own children in the 1990s and early 2000s. At that time Christian home education was quite a rarity. We were not particularly well off and the extra expense of home education meant we had to be sure not to waste money on expensive educational resources that were not as useful as they looked. We did not like the methods of modern secular textbooks and the only Christian ones were American, hard to get hold of and expensive. We soon got the hang of collecting books from charity shops and second-hand bookshops. This was much easier than it is today as charity shops then were stashed with old hardback children's books and second hand bookshops often did not charge the high prices that they do today. Once, to our delight, we found that the local teacher training college had unloaded a huge quantity of “out of date” books from its library on a bookseller who had a stall on a local indoor market. Here were wonderful books going for a few pence each! Quite a few of the treasures we collected during those years are now available to everyone again on the Mothers' Companion Flashdrive.
But old books were not always the complete answer. Take history for example. I soon found that there were no children's history books that suited my purpose. Yes, there were “ordinary” children's history books and yes, there were books that told history from a Christian perspective – for adults or for Americans! However, I found that trying to combine these into history lessons for my own children took a lot of time and preparation and when I had finished I had actually written a history book. This is now published as The Story of God's Dealings With Our Nationand is also included on the Mothers' Companion flashdrive.
We greatly benefited from the experience of Christian families who had home educated before us such as the Sherwoods, the Mahons, the Matthews and the Hardings. Another great help was the home education group, Christian Education for Deeside. This gave opportunities for socialisation with weekly meetings and summer camps and as Mums we created learning projects together. One of these is on the Mothers' Companion flashdrive as is a beautiful project about “Work” by a Mum from that inspiring generation of home educators ahead of us.
When my third child arrived it was a joy to dig out all the wonderful books and projects for use again. At the same time I wondered: would it be possible to preserve all this? I was often asked what I used and there was little point in giving a very long list of obscure and out of print books as an answer. Even today with the power of the internet at your disposal just try to find a copy of Speech Fun by Elaine Wainwright or What Happened Today? by Evan Owen and you will find it difficult. Could I republish these books in some way? I dismissed the idea for a while thinking that the copyright issue would be insurmountable. Anything very old like Little Arthur's England would not need permission, of course, nor would things I had written myself. For the projects we had made at Christian Education for Deeside I only had to ask my friends if they would be willing to allow me to include what they had done. Someone suggested an electronic format rather than hard copy would make it feasible. I made some tentative enquiries and found to my joy that most publishers were happy to let me use their very old out of print books. We purchased a scanner and I set to work.
There were no flashdrives in those days and the only method of presenting the material was on CDs. There was far too much material to put everything on a CD of course but with some juggling a year's worth would just about fit.
My original idea had been to simply load the PDFs onto a CD and leave the end users to find their way around them. My eldest son improved on this idea by writing HTML programmes that made the CDs work rather like a free-standing website. After the first few CDs my husband showed me how to write my own HTML by copying and editing the original and I was able to carry on with subsequent volumes on my own.
When the first CD was ready I was quite surprised by the demand. It certainly inspired me to go on with the arduous task of scanning and checking material for the next one. Proof-reading was a mammoth task. The OCR program was good but some of the books had small and battered type that did not scan well or were bound so tightly that no flatbed scanner could do an accurate job of the whole page. I appealed for volunteers and some lovely ladies came forward who enabled me to off load some of the task. Even now, of course, there are things that have slipped through the net. If you spot anything please let me know and I can put it right for subsequent users.
Eventually there were nine volumes on CDs and the cost of purchase was becoming higher, putting people off purchasing the whole set at once. I wondered about flashdrives. They were expensive and the purchaser could accidentally delete material from them. However, I found a cheap way of purchasing in bulk and and the deletion problem could be got round. If anyone sends me back a flashdrive that has accidentally been deleted I can simply reload it for them for free.
The demand for the flashdrives was steady and purchasers were getting a much better deal than was possible with the old CDs. A whole curriculum up to age 12 was now available for £20.
Of course it does not matter what a wonderful resource you have to offer for next to nothing if nobody know you've got it! I was very hampered in this regard by being far too busy with the actual home education of my youngest son to spend time travelling round the country promoting the Mothers' Companion. I did manage to go regularly to the Home Service (now CHESS) holiday at Cefn Lea which was not far from where we live. This was a good way of letting people to see what was on offer especially when I managed to take a bookcase full of all the actual books that were scanned onto the tiny flashdrive. I always imagined that when I “retired” from full-time home education I would take off with my stand to every home education show that was going. But... the Lord had other responsibilities for me that I had not thought of.
The website is a solution and, as you cannot see the big bookcase full of goodies, I have put together a complete set of sample pages from all the books on the flashdrive for you to look at here.