Finding Faith in Math Lessons

Holly Dodd shares how homeschooling with a Catholic curriculum can provide a foundation for living the faith at home every day. 

I’m a cradle Catholic. I went to Catholic school growing up where I attended religion classes, received sacraments, and went to weekly Mass. As a child I went to Mass on most Sundays and I gave up meat on Fridays in Lent. I believed in Jesus and Mary and the Bible; I believed that Christians should go to church on Sunday and be good people; but my thought process never extended beyond that. As I got older, being Catholic was something I showed up to when it wasn’t inconvenient; and as I entered my twenties, it was increasingly inconvenient. 

Enter children, many of them, to bring me back home to my faith. As my oldest children approached their teen years, I had this idea that I wanted to be sure they kept their faith, but when I reflected, I didn’t even know why. I realize now what a grace this desire truly was. I wasn’t sure where to begin, but God can even use internet algorithms to break through to us.

As I was realizing this desire for knowledge of the faith, I was also shopping for a new homeschool curriculum and God provided one. I picked up a deeply Catholic homeschool curriculum that I had never even known about before and began relearning my faith alongside my children while I taught them their academic subjects.  

Normalizing Faith in Math and Grammar Lessons 

For the younger children, the simple presence of Catholic life in their school books was surprisingly refreshing. Why not have priests and chalices and big families in your arithmetic word problems and your grammar lessons instead of just apples and cute animals and postage stamps? Why not connect your art lessons to saints and liturgical feasts? Their workbooks were normalizing their experience as Catholic children and teaching us all new things about our faith.  

My older kids were learning interesting things about the faith, like indulgences, that I had never even heard of. I was inspired by my teenage son's work in his Baltimore Catechism-based religion courses and learned a great deal alongside him. Looking back, it was celebrating the liturgical year at home as a part of this curriculum that truly changed the rhythm of our lives, starting with the celebration of Mary’s nativity to kick off the school year. Through celebrating the liturgical year in our home, we became Catholic every day, not just on Sundays. 

Living the Rhythm of the Liturgical Year  

Fast forward and things have really changed in our home. When we started living our faith in our home, and it was so wonderful, a part of me honestly felt guilty for not doing that sooner. I had teenagers, and I felt like I had failed them by not living the faith daily sooner. But in no time at all, liturgical living was just a normal way of life for all of us, and my oldest children have taken some of those traditions out into the world with them, even sharing with non-Catholics friends and roommates. We quickly became a family that others would come to with questions about how to celebrate a saint or liturgical feast. It quickly felt like we had lived this way all along.  

I believe my kids really get Catholicism. It's not just a religion we show up to, it's a life we live together as a family everyday. We live our faith in our home as vibrantly as we do in our church. We have Catholic artwork on our walls and a prayer table with seasonal liturgical colors. We celebrate feast days with fun treats, serious prayers, and silly traditions. We sometimes pray rosaries and evening vespers with our dinner guests. We feast on Sundays, and we fast on Ember days. We abstain from meat on Fridays, even outside of Lent. We talk about our faith everyday in normal conversation. Some of my boys talk about becoming priests one day.

It was easier than I thought it would be to become immersed in the Catholic faith, the Catholic life. It didn't happen overnight but it didn't take too long either and it all started with math problems and art lessons — and God’s grace. 

Share your thoughts with the Catholic Mom community! You'll find the comment box below the author's bio and list of recommended articles.

Copyright 2025 Holly Dodd
Images: Canva