Why I wrote TheCornerstone
In March of 2025 I went looking for a new religion curriculum for my four children, and I could not find one I wanted to use.
What we had been using read like a textbook written for first graders. It jumped from topic to topic with nothing holding it together. One week we would study the miracles of Jesus, the next week his real presence in the Eucharist, and nothing connected the two. It was dry, and I dreaded teaching it. That bothered me more than anything else, because religion was the subject I had most looked forward to when we decided to homeschool.
So I sat down and wrote out everything I wanted instead.
I wanted it family centered. With four kids I needed all of us learning the same thing at the same time, growing closer to each other and to God, instead of me working through a lesson with one child while the others waited their turn.
I wanted Scripture memorization that actually stuck. Not a verse read once in a lesson and forgotten by Friday, but one passage given a whole month, chosen to fit where we were in the liturgical year. The story of the three kings in January, during Epiphany. Proverbs tells us to write them on the tablet of your heart, and that is what I wanted for my children, with Catholic prayers committed to memory alongside.
I wanted the liturgical year to be the structure rather than a decoration. It only makes sense to sit with the Nativity near Christmas and the Resurrection near Easter.
I wanted art and music in it. We had been doing art appreciation through Mother of Divine Grace and my kids genuinely love it. Beauty opens conversations with children that a worksheet never will.
I wanted real books. The Bible first, but also the Catholic picture books that have become so beautiful in recent years. I call them living books throughout the curriculum, because they are nothing like textbooks. They rhyme, they tell stories, they make the saints into people a child can picture. One evening I was second-guessing whether stories deserved to be a main component instead of a supplement, and it struck me while I was praying about it that story is one of the central ways God teaches us. We were given a Bible, not an outline. Alongside those books I wanted my children to know their catechism well enough to explain and defend what we believe, which is why the Baltimore Catechism is in here in its question and answer form.
And I wanted room for our own traditions. Every Lent we build a crown of thorns out of toothpicks, one pulled for each act of charity. Every Advent, Mary and Joseph move a little closer to the stable. I have two overflowing binders of liturgical resources collected over four years, and I wanted all of that to live inside our learning instead of being one more thing I was scrambling to fit in.
With that list in hand I kept searching and kept coming up short. A few curricula had a piece or two of it. Nothing had all of it. I prayed about what to do, and what I really meant by that prayer was please send me something I can buy. Not something I have to write.
That same week I started writing it.
I never intended to publish it. I was making it for my own family, and somewhere partway through I realized other families might want it too.
That is TheCornerstone: A Catholic Liturgical Catechesis for Early Childhood through 5th Grade.
My hope is that it gives your family a way to teach the faith with joy and some consistency, with Scripture, prayer, beauty and your own traditions woven into ordinary days. Religion does not have to be the subject you check off before lunch. It can be the thing the rest of the day is built around.
Kylie Walterscheid
