Education at Home

For the past year and a half, I’ve been homeschooling my daughter. She’s now eight and in “second” grade. Most days we don’t follow a strict routine, and that works well for us. We manage to fit in all that we need to and I try not to stress about missing something that will impede [...]

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Children and Nature

Now that the heat is going away, we are spending even more time outdoors. I find it extremely important to teach my daughter about the environment around her, and how to take care of it. This morning we went for a hike on the nearby Natchez Trace. This is the second official “hike” she’s gone [...]

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Life is Full of Adventures

Summer is officially here in our part of the world. We are celebrating the last day of public school today as well as the beginning of a new adventure. Homeschooling. For personal, political, religious, and educational reasons (to name a few….) we’ve decided that our next new adventure will be to pursue a new brand [...]

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A Child’s Hand

Little hands can learn so much about caring for the earth!

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Cooking Kids

Our kids cook a lot.  We started out having them help us with what ever we were making.  They learned to mix, measure, crack eggs, identify ingredients, etc.  Gradually we did less and they did more.  Now JJ, who is 11, can make many things from scratch without any help from me at all (except [...]

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Bread Challenge Part 2

My favorite whole grain bread recipes and some tips on baking with kids!

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Cultivating Lifelong Learning

Perhaps one of the most atypical things our family does that clearly lands us in the “not dabbling in normal” category is the way we educate. Or rather self-educate. You see, our family follows a type of learning sometimes referred to as “unschooling” or “life learning”. For us, “life learning” means supporting our individual personalties, [...]

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homeschooling and summertime

being homeschoolers, we run on a different schedule than the government mandated school schedules. spring is such a hectic time for us that we find ourselves taking a break from school to get the garden going. in a way, we are still schooling as the kids are learning to grow food to feed themselves, a [...]

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little homeschool on the homestead – part 2

last month, i mentioned a few curriculums i like and a few book series that i have in my possession and use from time to time. this month, i thought i’d mention a few things we use that are not necessarily considered ‘proper’ for education plus i’ll go more into using our everyday experiences on [...]

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little homeschool on the homestead – part 1

there are many ways to homeschool and each state varies on the requirements. (go here to find you own state’s laws). in illinois, we are fortunate to have very lenient requirements and are not even expected to keep records. personally, i like keeping records though, just so i know what we’ve accomplished in the past [...]

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