Howdy!

Hey there! I’m Brenda. I’ve been married twenty five years, and we have six kids. We live on a small farm in Virginia, we eat mostly healthy, and I have been homeschooling forever.

I have merged four sites on this one website! I used to write about Health, Nutrition, Homesteading, and the GAPS Diet on The Well Fed Homestead. I wrote about Adoption, Foster Care & Adoptive Parenting at The Adoptive Mom. I wrote Charlotte Mason-Style Homeschool Reading Plans at The Gentle Learning Co., and I wrote about our local Homeschool Community and nonprofit at STAR Homeschool. It’s all here on this site, and I’m continuing to write here, as well.

Brenda Scott, STAR Homeschool

What This Site is All About:

When I was homeschooling our three boys, I felt overwhelmed by homeschool curriculum that divided my kids into different grade levels, like a public school. Our boys were 13 months and 10.5 months apart, and I liked keeping them together for as many subjects as possible. It’s possible to do this even with bigger age gaps of children, but it isn’t always easy to find curriculum that works like this.

Our boys have all graduated from our homeschool, and I am homeschooling our three daughters (17, 14, and 9). I still like teaching my children together for as many subjects as possible (I call this Whole-Family Homeschooling), and so, I created FREE homeschool reading plans with this in mind.

I’m obsessed with good books and spreadsheets, and I have combined both of these passions to create Christ-Centered, Charlotte Mason-Style, Chronological, Whole-Family Reading Plans, and I offer them for FREE on this website. It blesses me tremendously to share this work with you!

You can read a lot more about the Reading Plans and the Four Cycles here. You can find the reading plans for each of the cycles here:

STAR Homeschool Cycle 1

STAR Homeschool Cycle 3
STAR Homeschool Cycle 2

STAR Homeschool Bible Memory: Learn Scripture with Music

I LOVE God’s Word, and I want it in my head, my husband’s head, my kids’ heads, and in your family’s heads, too! I have been working on this super-fun Scripture Memory Project to share every song I can find that is word-for-word Scripture.

I’ve been homeschooling since our oldest (23 year-old son) was two (I was a little ambitious!). Over the years, I have learned SO much, and I love sharing the things I have learned with other moms. I currently lead a Homeschool Community in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I speak at a variety of Homeschool Conventions.

Health & Nutrition, The Well Fed Homestead, GAPS Diet, STAR Homeschool
The GAPS Diet The Well Fed Homestead STAR Homeschool
The Well Fed Homestead GAPS Diet Recipes

I have had quite a few health issues over the years, and our oldest son was born at 26-weeks gestation. I have Celiac Disease, but I didn’t know it for the first thirty years of my life. This led me to research and write about Health and Nutrition.

Our family ate according to The GAPS Diet for almost three years. It was SO healing for me! Back in 2010-2012, there weren’t many people blogging about GAPS. I started sharing the recipes I was creating & found a community that way.

I enjoy cooking and creating Recipes. You can find several of my recipe creations on this site. They’re mostly GAPS Diet-friendly, which means that they will work for people who eat Paleo, grain-free, and sometimes Whole 30.

The Well Fed Homestead & STAR Homeschool: Homesteading
Adoption, Foster Care & Adoptive Parenting
STAR Homeschool Road Trips

We owned an almost 30-acre farm in OR, and now we own an 8-acre farm in VA. We’ve raised our own laying hens, meat chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, pigs, beef cows, dairy cows, and bees over the years. You can find my Homesteading posts here.

We have adopted three out of six of our kids and we are in the process of adopting our sixth child. In addition, we’ve fostered eleven children. We have parented kids from hard places & I’ve written some posts about Adoption, Foster Care & Adoptive Parenting here.

We’ve been on three cross-country road trips and one time we spent a month in an RV, traveling through California. I haven’t written a lot about these trips YET, but I plan to add them to this page about Road Trips.

STAR Homeschool is a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit

I offer lots of ad-free content on this site in order to bless you. Please consider supporting this nonprofit ministry.

Let’s Connect!

Join the Email List on Substack here!

Recent Posts:

Our Family

Here’s an updated photo of our family, from Christmas 2024 (minus one of our sons, who lives in another state):