Written by Ella Bundy from podcast content

Before I started school, I was really interested in everything.

Growing up, my mom was an oil painter who had a library of books about the greatest artists in history – Michelangelo and Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci. I remember being really little and being fascinated with Leonardo da Vinci’s artwork, wanting to trace and recreate it. His inventions and drawings, even at such a young age, were so inspiring. At the same time, my dad was working for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center and this made me fascinated by space travel. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was really little, I was so curious about all these different topics – and I was excited about going to school, because I thought that school was going to make me everything I wanted to be!

Instead, I was happily surprised by the benefits of home-schooling. I remember that my mom got a stack of those black-and-white-speckled composition journals, and she wrote a different subject on the cover of each one: science, social studies, history, language arts, etc. She told me, “Go to the library and ask the librarian to give you a book for seventh grade on every subject.”

So I went to the local library, and the librarian pointed me to a section of “over-sized books.” She said, “These are big, beautiful books. Just flip through them, and when you figure out what you’re interested in, let me know! I’ll tell you what subject those topics cover.”

I flipped through dozens upon dozens of books, picking out all the things I wanted to learn about. Ancient Egypt, the Oregon Trail, Victorian architecture, the history of clothing, childhood brain development, nutrition and wellness. By the time I’d chosen all of these different interests, I wasn’t sure how they could all add up to cover the main subjects my mom had planned for. So I brought my findings back to the librarian and I remember her saying something about the beauty of real learning. She said, “Every topic covers every subject.”

In the days and weeks after that encounter, I went to the library and I turned all those composition journals into topic-based journals instead of subject-based journals. In the back of my mind, I had an idea forming that it would be really cool to be a curriculum developer for kids who learn like I do, and I almost went to college to do just that!

Instead, life had other plans for me. Rather than moving from high school to college, I got married and was working as a missionary in Hungary. I was in Russia. I was in Austria, Romania, Serbia, just serving. And loved it! For a while, I was worried I wouldn’t have time to build curriculums because of how quickly my life had changed, but I did end up helping create curriculum for vacation Bible schools and Christian curriculum. When I was still being home-schooled, I’d done a series of illustrations for Calvary Chapel’s curriculum for children. I’d nearly forgotten about it until I was on the mission field and in all those different places I was serving with Calvary Chapels, I saw my artwork! It was really surprising and gratifying, and reminded me just how important a calling creating curriculum was to me.

When my family and I settled down, this calling only grew stronger, and I think that’s a big reason for why I ended up creating the Fun-Schooling journals and Dyslexia Games. It was crucial for me to be able to help my kids – like my daughter Anna, who was dyslexic and needed to learn to read through logic games and puzzle. I had to find ways for my kids to be interested and happy with what and how they were learning! And it also became really important for me to build home-schooling resources that would help support other parents like me to do the same for their children!

Click the image below to check out the hundreds of journals now available at Thinking Tree Books!