Homesteading and Unschooling

I think we became accidental unschoolers. Homesteading and unschooling goes hand in hand. Unschooling was not for us when Aliceana was little, she was too young to find her own interests. I would toss and turn in bed on many sleepless nights wondering if she was learning enough. Now that she’s older and we live on a homestead, and honestly, I haven’t had a ton of time to teach one-on-one because life has gotten a whole lot busier. She’s learning more than ever now though.

Lately life has been busy, some days we’re just in survival mode. We have a 1 year old (Greeley), an almost 10 year old (Aliceana), and I’m very very pregnant (not to mention all of the animals we have to take care of.) So our life has been a lot of getting the bare minimum done. I had every intention of sticking with a homeschool curriculum, we were one week into a unit study focused on Living off the Land, but somehow our life actually trying to live off the land has taken over.

On our typical homeschool day AJ and I get up at 5 to take care of the animals, Aliceana is up at 6:30 to get ready for the day, Greeley wakes up around 7:00. Then it’s breakfast on the table, normally a huge breakfast because we have so many eggs. Then we work on math while Greeley plays. At about 9 Aliceana is writing research papers, normally about animals that she wants to learn more about, Greeley goes down for her morning nap, because mornings are obviously exhausting for a baby.

Aliceana then goes outside to play with animals, check for eggs, and feed the barn cats. We work on any other chores while Greeley sleeps, then it’s lunchtime. It’s back to feeding the kids, and that includes the bottle baby goats and the dogs which Aliceana normally feeds at this time. She might also move some animals into different pastures too now that everyone has had breakfast. After lunch Aliceana has piano to practice and some reading to do. I try to get as much done as I can with a 1 year old, and we hang out until about 4 when I have to start thinking about dinner. Back to feeding all of those kiddos again. Bottle babies get fed again at 6, animals get locked up at dark. We have a little bit of downtime where Aliceana retreats to her room until bedtime, probably drawing or playing Minecraft. Phew! Definitely not enough time in the day right now to spend hours on homeschool.

It all works out though, Aliceana is learning so much more than she would reading a lesson and completing some activities. Our life feels like one big science project after another, right now we have seeds growing, chicken food fermenting, fodder growing in our living room, several breeds of animals to learn everything about, we’re learning how to safely preserve food, and those are just a few things. We always have countless building projects that include so much real life math too; fencing, animal shelters, animal feeders, and the list goes on. Language arts is a subject she naturally enjoys and does on her own. She spends a lot of her spare time drawing, we chase after animals all day, capturing a baby pig is more cardio then I’ve ever had in a gym class, so I think that counts too.

So here we are unschooling, and learning so many lessons along the way. One of my favorite parts about homeschooling is that I get to learn alongside Aliceana, but now we learn so much by homesteading, even if a lot of things we learn are through trial and error. Trial and error means we learn a whole lot about the scientific method and hypothesis, right? We learn a ton through YouTube too, AJ and I just learned how to trim goat hooves this weekend, that’s a skill people make an entire career out of and we learned the basics in an afternoon with a couple videos.

Aliceana’s upcoming project is going to be raising rabbits. She has so much research to do, a shelter to build, and ultimately rabbits to take care of. She’s so excited about the project, now if only it would stop snowing long enough to start working on all of our building projects. I think the fact that we started on this homesteading journey when Aliceana was older helped a lot too, she’s helped with all of the plans and major additions to the homestead. She even picked out our now favorite goat, I won’t say which it is because we shouldn’t play favorites, right?

I toss and turn about a lot of things at night, I’m a mom, it happens. One thing I’m not worried about is whether Aliceana is learning enough. Homesteading and unschooling is more than enough.