This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: History for Christian Teens, Interview with Crystal Niehoff. 

History for Christian Teens, Interview with Crystal Niehoff

We have a new fellow podcaster on the ultimate homeschool Podcast Network. We are going to talk about the new podcast, History for Christian Teens, and about homeschooling for their family with Crystal Niehoff. 

About Crystal Niehoff

Crystal and her family are a military family. Her husband, Kevin, is a lieutenant colonel army chaplain, and he is also Crystal’s co-host – and fact checker – for the podcast. Kevin has a Master’s of divinity and a bachelor’s in History and a minor in Political Science. And both of them are huge history buffs.

Before, Crystal was the owner and CEO of Army Wife Network. And during that time, she also hosted and produced Army Wife Talk Radio. One of her most notable interviews was with Mrs. Karen Pence, the former Second Lady of the United States, as well as the entire cast of the Magnum PI series, which also served as one of the highlights of her career. 

BTW- For more interviews about military topics and homeschooling, check out these Homeschool Highschool Podcast episodes:

• Homeschooling Tips for Military Families
• What Military Recruiters Are Looking For in Homeschoolers
• Preparing for Military Careers

How It All Began

As a brand new Army wife, and with her husband on active duty, Crystal was trying to figure all that out when she came across Amy Wife Network. Eventually, she started blogging for them, and, when it came up for sale, she decided to buy the business. 

And so she grew it from there. 

Later, Crystal sold it to one of her coworkers, a sweet gal who had volunteered for her for many years and another military wife. She is still running Army Wife Network to this day. Except now, Crystal is getting ready to start blogging for them again. Quite the cycle!

Crystal’s advice to all mompreneurs:

Don’t wait for your ship to come in; swim out to it!

Crystal’s Homeschool Life

Crystal and her family have been homeschooling since the year 2000. They have five children and five grandchildren, and they now continue their homeschooling journey with their two youngest who are getting set to graduate high school next year.

Not only that, Crystal is homeschooling her oldest granddaughter, Lexi, long-distance. Technology has been a blessing for them because it has allowed them to be able to continue that homeschooling legacy. 

Thanks to technologies, such as Skype and texting, she is able to stay connected with her daughter and granddaughter to help homeschool her where she lives. In fact, she wrote about it for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine and was published last year in 2021. 

Additionally, her daughter has been inspired by her mother and is looking at homeschooling her oldest son when he starts kindergarten next fall. In this sense, Crystal is a second-generation homeschooler, having homeschooled her kids and now her grandkids are homeschooling.

Homeschooling As A Military Family

Military families usually move around a lot, and that was the case for Crystal and her family too. Because of this, homeschooling was such a blessing for them. But it was not without its challenges. 

Sometimes maintaining some continuity can be difficult when moving from place to place. But the neat thing is, homeschooling was a stabilizer in their life of moving pieces.

Military or civilian, homeschooling helps bond families. Because the parents really experience education with their children by learning right alongside them, which was the same experience with Crystal and her family.

Learning History for Homeschooling Families

Crystal learned history with her kids in a way she had not experienced before in public schools. One difference was that they chose to learn from a Christian perspective. It has been amazing for them to learn history as a family, not necessarily as “just the kids’ homeschooling.” Crystal calls it a family adventure. 

In fact, almost everything can become a history learning adventure for the Niehoff family. For instance, when they lived in Hawaii, they visited Pearl Harbor and Wheeler Air Army Airfield. There they learned World War II history right alongside their kids.

About Their Podcasting Adventure

Originally, it was supposed to be just Crystal doing the history podcast, but every time she talked about it with her husband, his eyes lit up. So she asked him if he wanted to cohost with her, and to her surprise, he said yes. And so, their podcast adventure began. 

Their heart is to genuinely bring history to life as they see it as more of a living thing. Crystal especially wanted to take the history podcast a step further by taking it towards a biblical perspective, or by “putting on your biblical glasses and seeing it through that lens,” according to Crystal. 

One way to describe this is:

If you are nearsighted, and you do not have your glasses on, you can still see up close without them. But if you get in your car, you really need to put your glasses back on because you will not be able to see much about a block away. 

But once your glasses are on, you can see the stop signs or the squirrel running across the road. And so it is the same with history or with life in general, when to have biblical glasses on, seeing it through the eyes of the Creator.

By doing this, you can understand why someone may make the choices that they’ve made. You can not only understand why they made these choices, but also perhaps take lessons from them to apply to your own life. 

Thus, in each podcast, Crystal and Kevin try to come up with lessons to present in the podcast, but still keep the podcast episode short (around fifteen or twenty minutes) so it be pleasurable to listen to. 

Crystal calls these history lessons “life application lessons,” and they try to present three things that listeners can learn from, such as:

• A specific person from history or
• Something about life that can be applied to their own lives.
• A takeaway: “What can they learn from that?”

The podcast is unique on the Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network in that it is specifically geared for teens. It is called History For Christian Teens. Not only the parents but teens can listen to it on their own as well. And if they do, they can log hours towards leveling up their history credits when they are working on history. 

Podcast Topic Example

Here are a few podcast examples that are on History For Christian Teens:

• Old Testament
• New Testament
• People and events in British history
• Characters from the bible, such as Adam and Eve, Sarah and Abraham
• Archaeological evidence

After they make their episode topics, Kevin will fact check. Afterward, Crystal and Kevin will take the Life Application lessons to give scriptural reasons to ensure its evidence is scripturally based.

BTW- The Niehoffs have also started the Military Homeschool Podcast.

HOW TO CONNECT

Check out the History for Christian Teens podcast app

• Facebook History for Christian Teens
• Email: historyforchristianteens@gmail.com

Thank you to Richie Soares with Homeschool and Humor for writing this blog post!

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