Our family began home educating in 1991.  At the time, I was a new convert to the Catholic faith and became fascinated with history, a subject that I had never learned well in school and which came to life when understood through the lens of my newfound faith.  I discovered that our Catholic faith is central to all areas of our lives. The Catholic Church is deep in history and studying the history of our faith deepens one's understanding of God's plan for the world. Our Lord is truly the center of all history! I wanted my children to be head over heels in love with their God and their Catholic faith, too, and so we set out on an exciting journey. 

In the Jubilee year 2000, our family began RC History, to provide a place for Catholics to find reliable resources for studying history and the Catholic Faith. We had used history as the center of our family’s education for many years, and had become convinced of the importance of understanding true history, but were also frustrated by constantly having to sift through piles of booklists and catalogs looking for the resources we were willing to use. Our goals are to offer you reliable information, books and materials which will enhance your study of history and strengthen your faith as a Catholic family without having to do all the searching and sifting that we had to do when we were starting out.

The Connecting with History program started as the outgrowth of our family's educational experiences as well as an ongoing conversation held on an email discussion group that I had been a member of for several years. The discussion of history and various curricular choices - or the lack thereof, particularly for Catholic families - caught the imagination of several of us. Over time a smaller group of women continued to bounce around many ideas and shared some of our own experiences - ideas that had worked and those that hadn't worked. This little brainstorming session eventually evolved into two of us, Andrea Chen and I, working together to create a history curriculum that would meet our criteria.

What we attempted to achieve was to create a framework for an integrated curriculum with history as its core. We brainstormed a wish list for the "ideal" curriculum. Our vision for studying history included the following criteria:

Catholic
Chronological
Classical
Family-Centered
Integrated Subjects
Encourage Active Learning

These were the goals that Andrea and I began to incorporate into writing our history program. During the summer of 2001 Andrea and I worked together - by email - to put all this into a usable framework that would fill as many of these wishes as possible. The result was our first edition of Connecting With History which includes the study of ancient history and the Old Testament from a Catholic worldview. We were given permission by Jeff Cavins to align the ten units of this volume with the Old Testament units of his Bible Timeline, a program which teaches the Bible through the narrative story of salvation history.

Margot Davidson, owner of Hillside Education Press, was recruited to write literature guides to accompany the program.  The literature guide series, Novel Inquiries, includes three age-graded volumes which incorporate structured literature study based on books used within the Connecting with History series.

Our next goal was to come up with three more volumes filling out a four-year cycle of history studies covering all of world history, with the idea that once a family had gone through all four years of the cycle they would then go back to the beginning and start all over. As a family cycled through a second time each child would be four years older and able to study the time periods at a deeper level.  Being busy homeschooling moms ourselves these plans were delayed for several years due to life circumstances. 

In 2006, Connecting With History, Volume Two was published. With the invaluable help of two fellow Catholic homeschooling moms and dear friends, Margot Davidson and Julie Novak, a certified teacher who has been using the Connecting with History approach for several years in her own homeschool, Volume Two became a reality.

Volume Three was published in 2011 and plans for Volume Four are underway for 2012.

We are honored and humbled by the enthusiastic response Connecting with History has received over the years.  Time and time again I have received calls and emails telling me of the blessing this program has been to families.  Connecting with History is in all 50 states as well as several countries outside of the U.S, attesting to the universality of the Faith and our common history.  With your prayers and support we hope to continue this labor of love.

Yours in Christ,

Sonya Romens