As I write, we are bringing our ninth year of homeschooling to a close. Our oldest child is about to begin high school and our fifth will begin “doing school” with his older siblings this Fall. By this point in our homeschooling journey, I would say we are experienced but certainly not experts of this whole schooling-at-home thing. In fact, I would say homeschooling has been the most challenging and yet most rewarding thing we have ever done in our lives.
My husband nor I had any experience when we started homeschooling our oldest. We both attended public school from Kindergarten through 12th grade. We shared one mutual friend who was homeschooled up until high school and that really was it for our exposure to this alternative form of education. So when we began homeschooling our son in preschool, our only model for school looked exactly like what we experienced.
I purchased the expensive all-in-one preschool curriculum that assured me my child would be learning by leaps and bounds. We started school when our local public school started and took breaks when all the other kids took breaks. It worked. Until it didn’t. Our fourth child was born by the time our first was five years old. It was a whirlwind. To be honest, I just couldn’t keep up. Not only did I have unrealistic expectations for myself and for our five year old son, sticking to a standard academic calendar didn’t really work well for our lifestyle.
Over the years and through the course of adding more babies, we have adjusted our expectations, our curricula (numerous times), and our schedules. For much of the past decade, my husband has been a student himself so we found ourselves doing school when he did school and taking breaks when he took breaks. But now that he has graduated and we are settling into our new routine here on the homestead, we find ourselves settling into a new groove with homeschooling as well.
Our days begin with feeding the animals before we feed ourselves. And during the Summer months, when the sun is blazing hot, you will find us working in the garden early in the morning to beat the heat and stealing away to the cool air conditioned house to complete our school work in the afternoons. Yes, we do school during the Summer.
Being home full time has given us the ability to dictate our own schedules. We school year round and take breaks every handful of weeks when big tasks or homestead projects need to be done. While most people are taking Spring break, we are plunking along with our school work. When May hits, we take a couple weeks off for Spring planting. When the weather turns hot and most kids are on Summer break, we continue our lessons. And when Harvest time hits and we are up to our ears in produce from the garden, we take another couple of weeks off to work on canning and preserving and stocking the pantry.
Our schooling rhythm isn’t dictated by the days on the calendar but by the seasons in our life. Book work may not be happening when we are sowing seeds, butchering chickens, or tucking the garden in at the end of the season. But our kids are learning some hands on, practical lessons on how to take care of our home and our animals and are learning how to provide for themselves in very real ways. Through our years of homeschooling and into homesteading we are realizing the beauty of following the natural rhythms of life on the homestead. The learning never ends and I don’t think it is supposed to.
