Caring for land is far from easy, but the benefits of a homestead homeschool type of education are endless. Teaching children once-forgotten skills like gardening, food preservation, and raising animals go hand-in-hand with a practical education focused on teaching children to love and care for nature.
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Finding Our Homestead
About three years ago, my family and I put in an offer on a fixer-upper farmhouse. It was nestled back on 2.5 acres, right in the middle of the city.
Neither my husband nor I had prior experience with owning land or growing food. We knew nothing about home renovations or raising chickens and bees. All of my past garden attempts had ended in failure. So it really was a big change–and risk–for our family to take on a project of this size.
We moved into our little farmhouse with our then 1.5 year old son. Since then, we’ve added to our family and have spent the last three years restoring our home, learning to grow our own food, and attempting a new old-fashioned skill every few weeks–our children learning right alongside of us.
In recent years, homesteading has become quite the trend. Perhaps it’s the draw of a simpler way of life. A desire to grow and preserve organic food that is free of pesticides and other chemicals. A hope to be more self-sufficient than in years past.
A Homestead Homeschool for Raising Naturalists
But for me, perhaps the greatest draw is teaching my children to know and appreciate and truly value where their food comes from. To take part in the marvelous processes of growing food from seed, harvesting and tasting in-season produce, cooking and preserving food that they tended to for months.
The great Charlotte Mason once said, “We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.”
Getting Started with Your Homestead Homeschool
There are times when I feel overwhelmed by how much I have to learn. I often think how much easier it would be to teach my kids these skills if I wasn’t so new to them myself. But that’s part of the beauty of it, isn’t it?
How much more will our kids learn from seeing our own learning process than if we were already experts? Perhaps seeing us start from scratch and struggle when things don’t go as planned will model for them courage. Perseverance. A love of learning. Intrinsic skills that will carry across all subjects as they continue on in their education.
Even if you weren’t aware of the process it takes to grow food, don’t be afraid to just try. A few years ago, I didn’t know that potatoes grew underground. I didn’t know that different breeds of chickens laid different colored eggs.
Now, my young children are able to identify most of the plants in our garden. They know which chicken lays which egg. They appreciate our bees and are beginning to understand the role they play in helping our food grow.
Homestead Homeschool Skills to Learn
If you want to integrate homesteading with homeschooling, here are some skills to teach your children. By using some creativity, you can holistically cover many academic subjects such as math, literature, science, and history by teaching many of the skills below:
- Starting seeds
- Planning a garden
- Caring for a garden
- Safely canning food (I like this beginner’s canning guide for reference!)
- Fermentation
- Raising backyard chickens
- Baking bread
- Making butter
- Composting
- Beekeeping (this beginner’s beekeeping guide is so helpful!)
- Cheese making
- Sewing
- Grain milling
- Making yogurt
- Sourdough
- Carpentry
- Rendering tallow
- Making bone broth
Not sure where to get started? Check out The New Homesteader’s Handbook that I co-wrote with my friend Jessica of Prairie Creek Homestead.
Learn which skills to prioritize as a new homesteader plus advice for how to get started–even if you don’t own lots of land. This guide is perfect for parents who are new to homesteading who want to involve their young children in the process!
Get The New Homesteader’s Handbook Here
Resources for Your Homestead Homeschool
Here are some other resources if you want to begin integrating homesteading with homeschooling but aren’t sure where to start!
the heritage schoolhouse
The Heritage Schoolhouse was started by Danielle Jones of Jones Roots. Danielle is a homeschool mama, homesteader, and artist. She creates most of the artwork in her curriculum by hand!
I personally love Danielle’s daily homestead rhythm cards. They are beautiful and include a lot of common homestead-related skills that many other daily schedule card packs lack.
She also creates skill-based unit studies for different ages. Some of her unit studies are about bread, market gardens, and raising chickens.
Homestead Morning Time Bundles
I created these homestead-themed, seasonal morning time bundles for my kids. We currently use The Peaceful Preschool for our homeschool curriculum, and then I supplement with a few other resources.
Some of these resources include these morning time bundles. They are designed to work on early math, literacy, and fine motor skills for kids ages 2-6.
The activities can be adapted based off your child or children’s needs and are a great way to expose your children to seasonal homesteading vocabulary while also practicing important skills.
Recommended to use as your morning basket during morning time or to supplement your homeschool curriculum.
Check out the Homestead Morning Time Bundles Here.
Photo by Kristen of @righteousmotherhood on Instagram.
The homestead education
I personally have not used this curriculum, but I found it when searching for homestead-related educational materials.
The Homestead Education was started by Kody Hanner, and her motto is, “Helping you and your kids grow your own food and grow as a person.”
She offers a variety of homestead-themed learning resources covering topics including history, science, literacy, survival basics, curriculum kits, and more!
The Beauty of Slow Living
Intentionally choosing to slow down and put many modern conveniences to the side is not always easy. It is rarely picture perfect and it requires grit and determination and a willingness to fail and try again.
But in my experience, although limited, taking time to marvel at and care for plants and animals is one of the greatest forms of education. Not only for our children but for us as parents as well.
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