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By NATHAN MARCHAND
Ray and Donna Reish of Craigville started their own curriculum publication called “Training for Triumph” that has received wide acceptance within the home-schooling communities.
The Reishes are the parents of seven children: Joshua, 25; Kayla, 22; Cami, 20; Kara, 17; Jonathan, 15; Josiah, 13; and Jacob, 9.
According to the Training for Triumph website, Ray, 48, and Donna, 44, started homeschooling 23 years ago when they worked with Donna’s mentally handicapped sister for a year.
“At that time we began reaching out to home-schoolers in our area who needed a ‘covering’ — someone with an education degree to vouch for their home schools,” Donna wrote on the website.
Donna has an undergraduate degree in elementary education from Ball State University, and she did master’s work in reading education, also from Ball State. Ray earned a degree in accounting from Ball State, and he has done master’s work in business and Bible studies.
After a few years of experience, Ray and Donna started writing articles and workshops. Then eight years ago, after home-schooling their seven children, they began writing language arts curriculum for the Advanced Training Institute (ATI). They have written 16 curriculum books for ATI so far.
The couple then started Training for Triumph in 2004 as a “ministry and business,” and have since published more than 20 language arts, composition and speech textbooks. Their daughter, Kayla, has also published a children’s compilation of biographies titled, Cloud of Witnesses. They have also been able to re-title the curriculum they wrote for ATI and offer it to all home school students as “Character Quality Language Arts” (CQLA).
Ray and Donna’s latest book, The Well-Trained Heart, however, is not a textbook. According to the back cover, this book “gives you a window into one family’s homeschool journey of more than 20 years to reveal an approach that focuses on character, spiritual development, and life purpose, without sacrificing academic success.”
“We decided we could reach more people if we made our own curriculum,” said Donna. “[Writing for Advanced Training Institute] was a stepping stone for us.”
Their curriculum is used across the globe.
“We have 4,000 to 5,000 students using our curriculum around the world,” said Donna.
But the Reishes do more than write books.
“Locally, we have cottage classes and offer enrichment classes for homeschoolers,” said Donna.
These are taught by Ray, Donna and their three oldest children. They teach between 80 and 100 students locally each year in these classes.
The subjects and their instructors are:
–Ray: speech and debate.
–Donna: composition and language arts.
–Josh: literature, history, government, speech, debate, and story writing.
–Kayla: biology, chemistry, Spanish, research papers, speech, and debate.
–Kara: elementary and middle school speech and writing.
Speech and debate are big parts of their cottage classes because they joined the NCFCA (National Christian Forensics Communicators Association) several years ago after their older children expressed interest in the subjects.
But Training for Triumph is about more than academics.
“We want to help students become well-educated adults, godly Christians and good citizens,” said Donna.
This should be no surprise since the subtitle for Training for Triumph is “Training hard is about training minds.”
“A lot of people think if you’re training character, you’re not worried about academics,” said Donna. “And if you’re training academics, you’re not worried about character. That’s not true.”
The Reishes have gone to many state home school conventions where they have spoken on many topics, including language arts, family living, marriage, ages and stages of children, and raising teens. They have also offered dozens of creative workshops, such as “The Top Twenty Pieces of Home School Advice From Twenty Years of Home Schooling” and “Prioritizing Your Life, School, and Home.”
It seems to be working with their own children.
Joshua graduated from high school in 2001 and then earned a degree in history from Thomas Edison University in 2004. He tested out of his entire degree except for two classes.
Kayla graduated in 2005 and went on to earn her RN degree from IPFW in 2008.
Cami graduated in 2006 and is currently a junior at Southern Assembly of God University in the college’s distance learning program.
For more information about Training for Triumph, you can visit their web site www.tfths.com.