Homestead Homeschool – How We Raise Self-Sufficient Children

Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me on the homestead education. I’m recording this shortly after Mother’s Day, and I hope that everybody had a great Mother’s Day weekend. This year, we did our annual get lost in the woods trip. So I always have to explain what that is. I get itchy for drives for springtime, for sunshine, usually about this time of year, every year. So, our first big drive or weekend trip of the year is always Mother’s Day. And what we like to do is try to go explore somewhere new. So, the last two years, our attempts to explore somewhere new ended up with us stuck in the snow in May. So this year we decided to try something a little different. We decided to go over to Whitefish, Montana and get a hotel room for a couple of nights. We got a really, you know, just a regular hotel room, had an indoor pool, lots of room for the kids.

And we were just going to enjoy our weekend drive around a little bit, see if we could get up to Glacier National Park, which the going to the sun road was shut down because of all the snow still. But we got to see late McDonald, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. And I put a bunch of really great photos up on Instagram. So if you have a chance, go check those out. But what really was so amazing for this trip for me, uh, it kind of goes back to about nine years ago, right after I graduated from college, I knew that I needed to set myself a goal and I didn’t want that goal to just be, be at my job for five years or make a certain amount of money. I wanted a goal that really embodied like what I was trying to do with my life.

And so I was scrolling online. I knew that I’d kind of wanted to move out of the state. I was living in and was looking around at different pictures. And I found this picture of an old barn in a field with a mountains behind it in a rainbow. And that picture was taken in Whitefish, Montana. Yes. Where we went for Mother’s Day. And I screenshotted that on my old iPhone four. I think I have a 13 now or something, and that picture has stayed on my phone. I don’t even think it’s in my pictures anymore, but somehow it’s managed to stay as my screenshot, like photo for the front of my phone for all these years. So every time I open my phone, I look at it and that goal was, I still didn’t have words for it. I just knew it was something, a feeling that I wanted and something I wanted to like look out my window and see, and be a part of.

So when my husband and I bought our ranch in Idaho, we had this, we have this pretty nice barn. It’s out in the middle of a field. There’s the mountains behind it. And it reminded me a lot of that photo on my phone. And so I kind of had this feeling like I told myself, like, okay, I I’ve reached my goal. This is pretty great. And doesn’t hurt that our ranch is directly over the mountain from Whitefish Montana. So it, it just felt really good, but it didn’t feel complete yet. And I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in that complete feeling. Now, I don’t think there’s ever a place where you completely reach all your goals or that there’s an end point, but I’ve been waiting for this feeling of that. I’ve accomplished something that I was aiming for. And so we went on this trip and it was, we usually, when we plan our trips, we have to SCR and save and make sure everything is just in line.

We budget how much we can spend for food. And this year we were able to just say, let’s go on a trip, get a hotel room. You know, we have a little money in savings, let’s do it. And while we were waiting to check into the hotel room, we decided to just go for a drive around white fish. Now we’re not really like downtown tourist type people. We obviously are get lost in the woods trip. So we started taking some back roads around town. My husband was driving, I was playing on my phone. I don’t even, I had no clue where we were. And all of a sudden I looked up out in this field and there was the barn from my phone. And I’m telling you, I literally cheered up. And something about that told me that I had really come full circle. Like I had kind of met my goal and not just because I saw the barn, but it was that we had gotten to a place where a stable place, I think is what I was, is what I’m aiming for.

And we’re able to just take off on this weekend trip, enjoy some time with the kids. And then yeah. Seeing the barn. And I took some pictures. I did a little reel on Instagram about it. It’s probably not my best feel ever, but it was just so amazing to me. I really wanted to go ahead and share that with everybody. So if you get a chance, go check out my pictures. And if you’ve ever had a moment like this, I’d really love to hear about it because I just think it’s so great to hear about reaching goals.

So that was my little chat about how my week has been going. What we’re planning on doing for next week is working on our garden. So when we moved to our property, we had two great gardens. Both of them fenced, both of ’em had had soil amendments. One of ’em has a small orchard outlining it. And it’s kind of down in a little saddle on our property. And it’s just, I love working in there in the summertime, have shade from the orchard trees. It’s, it’s a special place for me, but the garden up by our house, actually both of our gardens, but the one up by our house, I call it the kitchen garden that one’s going to be getting redone this year. And that’s because we have a horrible weed problem here. The weeds just absolutely take over our entire garden, specifically one called common purse lane.

And I have tried every trick in the book. I even have some stories on Instagram about it. I’ve put down. I mean, I’ve tried weeding, tilling, burning, putting down, ay, putting down mulch. I, I think I’ve tried everything there is that I cannot keep this plant out of our garden in any way, shape or form. And it completely takes over. And I spend tons of time pulling it and not paying attention to some of the other stuff that’s going on in my garden. And this year we just decided we were done. We can’t keep doing this, that our gardens are not getting the attention that they need because we’re spending so much time fighting the weeds. And we actually end up putting our gardens in later than we should, because we’re always trying to get all the weeds out of there to start fresh. So this year we decided to do raised beds.

Now we couldn’t do that last year, because the lumber prices were just completely out of control. And honestly this year they are too, not nearly as bad, but definitely on the high end of the budget. But we have a friend that works at a mill and they’re running Cedar right now. And if they have boards that are not to spec or are under four feet long, they just put ’em in a scrap pile. And if nobody comes and takes ’em then you know, when the scrap pile gets to a certain size, they burn them. So this friend said, he’s just going to bring home all that wood for us. And we’re going to go ahead and put together. I’m going to aim for four by eight raised beds if they’re a little shorter because that’s the size of the wood that we have. I mean, that’s totally fine with me because free is always better than having to like put a lot of money into something like this.

I mean we’re all homesteaders and part of our goal is saving money where we can. And, but the important thing is also not scrimping and ending up having to spend more money, doing things over and over again, which is something that I think everybody has to learn their lesson on, but it happens. So the next one, this, these same friends, they are cattle ranchers happen for. I mean their family’s been ranching in our area for close to a hundred years and they have a really great manure pile that has been composting. And they’re going to let us fill our raised beds with this aged compost. We’re going to put some top soil on going to go ahead and put a good fence up. I’m going to splurge on the fencing because we have a lot of deer and elk and um, our cows definitely see electric fencing as optional, which is how I lost my garden towards the end of last summer.

So I want to make sure that everything is staying out. We’re going to go ahead and put in a drip irrigation system. I’m going to have my raised beds far enough apart to run my wheelbarrow through. I’m going to hang small planters from my fence for herbs. Cause I’ve been struggling with trying to start an herb garden for a couple of years. And I think that they’re going to get more attention being in my garden in that way. So I’m really super excited to see how this is all going to come together. I kind of imagine this little like food forest going on inside my garden, like a really special place for me to spend my summer afternoons. And then in our big garden that isn’t going to get raised beds, probably not for a couple of years, we’re going to go ahead and plant corn and squash down there. They grow really great together and that’ll give me a lot of room to have rows of corn and the squash can just spread out and I don’t have to worry about them taking over like my tomato plants or my peppers or something and them getting too much shade.

I also in this big space that doesn’t have the raised beds. I can use my Cedar. We have a champion Cedar that we absolutely love. I’ve noticed lately they’re hard to get online, but I have posted some links on where to get them like through Amazon and a couple other hardware stores that are able to get ’em in. They aren’t always the champ brand, but I really love them because they just save your back. Like you can just load your seeds and walk a straight line. I mean it even like digs a little ditch and then covers it back up. I mean, they’re just amazing and such backs savers. So now that we’ve talked about my garden a little bit, hopefully I can tell you that we’ve gotten some stuff done next week. Although if you are busy homesteaders, like me, chances are um, not a lot Scott and done, then I’m going to go ahead and get onto our main topic, which this week is what our homeschool actually looks like.

So with our homeschool, we haven’t always been homeschoolers. We started out with our children in public school, just like we did. We were my husband and I both went to public school and we didn’t. We switched about six years ago. So we were definitely before the big COVID rush of everybody switching to homeschool, this was a choice that we made for our family due to things we had going on in our life. One of ’em was I’ve mentioned before we don’t have neurotypical children. So we were definitely dealing with the special ed programs and our kids getting into a little bit of trouble at school, nothing major, but I, I just felt like we were always at the school. We went grocery shopping one time in the next town over because we always live in small towns and I got a call that, you know, my second grader was completely out of control, and I needed to come get him. And we were 30 minutes away standing in line at Costco. Like I, I had no clue how I was going to get there in time to deal with him. And that was just a constant stress for me, constant anxiety, constantly worrying about, you know, if I go do something I need to do today, it’s something going to go on with my kids. And I never felt like I could just relax.

So then after our oldest, he was in eighth grade at the time, um, we had an eighth grader, a sixth grader and two third graders. We had the twins and our oldest, he got into a little bit of trouble. It wasn’t major, but it was definitely like, okay, it’s time to reset and decide what we’re going to do. So we pulled him out. We were going through a charter that I’ve talked about before. It was a homeschool charter where they actually, they give you a certain amount of money. You can spend every semester for your kids’ curriculum. And they would go to a cohort one time a week, work with a teacher, email, their assignments send to a teacher. So it was a really good transition from doing standard public school to homeschooling. Um, after that, uh, the, my twins, they they’re really smart, but with their neuro neurotypical issues, they definitely struggled in the school setting. So they would come home every day and want me to put together extra math lessons for them to do just like their brother was getting to do. So I was literally schooling my eighth grader all day long and then turning around and schooling the twins for two or three more hours, because they wanted to learn algebra concepts in the third grade,

After a little bit of persuasion with my husband, he agreed to let me go ahead and give the twins a trial run, um, homeschooling for the rest of the year. We were eh, about a third of the way through the school year when it started. So at this point I was schooling three of our kids, our sixth grader was still going to school and we actually thought that was the best place for him because he is really social. And then he actually got into a situation with a kid who beat him up pretty bad. And we knew that for his safety, he needed to be home for a while, but we didn’t want to force him because he has O D D and that’s oppositional defiance disorder. And if we forced him to homeschool, then we definitely wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be a positive scenario for any of us.

So it was actually about a month later, we were driving to go pick up our fair picks for that year. And he just asked like, can I start homeschooling? I want to be home with everybody. And we in the car right there, we ordered all his curriculum and decided we would let the school know on Monday with that. Uh, I kind of want to talk about choosing curriculum. It there’s so many to choose from. And I actually, I wrote a post about this recently and I’ll link that as well. It’s just really choosing, deciding what’s right for your family. There’s no right or wrong curriculum. Everything out there is really great. I, I can’t say that anything works better than the other because it’s about your kids, your family, your routine. But what I did do is I started@kathyduffy.com or I think it’s Kathy Duffy reviews.com. I’ll have to check that and she reviews curriculum and then categorizes them by subject and grade and talk.

She has a little spot in the corner where she puts what age group they’re for the price, how much work it takes, whether it’s religious or secular. And I mean, it’s a really great place to start because you can kind of see what somebody else thinks about it. You can see some samples, she doesn’t have everything on there. And especially with the new explosion of a lot of, um, other online principals like teachers pay teachers.com and a lot of bloggers that are writing like unit studies. I think those are all really valid because especially with homeschooling it’s about exploration and letting your kids kind of find what they really like. And possibly once you get into like junior high and high school levels, it might be better to get curriculums that have a little bit more of a basis to them to prepare your kids for college, if that’s their choice.

But I think that, you know, either teachers pay teachers, Kathy Duffy, or even just digging around on Pinterest, you’re going to find a lot of really great options. Um, a lot of ’em are free or really low cost, especially if you’re going to print yourself that you can try out a few things and see what’s actually really working for your family. So once we actually got into homeschooling, I found that this was actually way less stress for me than having the kids in public school. I didn’t have to worry about that surprise phone call. Every time I tried to do something positive for myself. In fact, the day that our oldest had gotten in trouble, our baby was six months old and I had decided for the first time to leave him with somebody while my husband and I went to the gym for a little while, the two of us together and we were really looking forward to it.

We dropped the baby off with grandpa and we were driving to the gym when we got the phone call. And I just, I really felt like I needed to be able to be in a place where I could do the best for my children and make sure that my husband and I were taking care of ourselves as well. And so having the kids home actually ended up being a really huge positive for us. It still had its stresses. Don’t get me wrong, especially learning how to homeschool four kids all at once that had been in a public school setting for their whole lives. We did a four day a week plus a half day cohort in the next town over, which is where they’d go and meet with their teachers and other kids and stuff. And I just felt like, oh my gosh, we were so busy, like learning to teach them, encouraging them to do their extracurriculars like baseball and four H and trying to make time for this cohort that I was doing.

What like almost every homeschooler tells you not to do, which is don’t do school at home. Now, if this is right for you, I think that’s great. Especially if you’re doing like a short time homeschool to get a child caught up or something and they’re going to go right back into the school. The public school setting, the doing school at home might be the right choice for you. But that wasn’t what we were trying to do for our family. So the second year I sat down and came up with a new plan and I can’t even really tell you what the plan was at this point. Cause it’s been a few years. But what I definitely know I did is I dialed back how much time we spent doing school, how many lessons I expected the kids to do a day. I had a little bit of a rotating type schedule where they did like math and science one day in English and social studies the next day so that they weren’t.

And they would do a little bit more each day, but they weren’t trying to cram everything in and they had a little bit more time to dive a little deeper, ask questions. We could add movies to it. And I really didn’t feel like we were floundering as bad and with not doing as much school time as a family, we spent a lot more time in the woods, which is absolutely what we love. We went for drives. We were hunting, we were hiking. We were finding creeks. I was teaching the kids how to do GPS coordinates, how to pack like survival bags. It was, it was a great experience. The kids still talk about it. We’ve got so many pictures, so many memories. And that was when I feel like our homeschool really took the turn for more of a positive. It was shortly after that time, we decided to move to Idaho, which is an extremely homeschool, friendly state.

And it has a lot less of the charter type programs like we had in Oregon because there is no requirements for homeschooling in Idaho. In fact, I believe the wording is something like it is suggested to teach children all the core subjects that’s required for that age. I mean, it it’s, it’s really, really basic. So I mean, we don’t have to check in with the school district, nothing like that. So right off the bat. Oh, and there’s also in the community. We’re in, has so many great programs for homeschoolers. In fact, about 50% of our community home schools. When we started here, we knew we didn’t want to do five days a week anymore. We knew that was just too much for us. We were setting up a new homestead. We wanted to explore a new area. This just wasn’t what we wanted to focus on.

I mean, we had three year old and one on the way I knew I didn’t have an in me for a five day, week schedule anymore. So we switched to three days a week. At first, when we switched to three days a week, it was really great. You know, the kids were just enjoying having that amount of time off, but I did have to reassess how much they were getting done in their curriculums. Some curriculums, this worked really great for where I could like do a rotating week where they had one, like an extra subject time at the end of the day where they would do the fourth day of the week for whichever curriculum. And that kind of kept them caught up. Or if there was a test, they would do their work for the week and then do the test, even if it was normally scheduled for the next day in the curriculum.

And we were able to, we’ve been able to make that work for us pretty well for the last couple of years when I’m writing my blogs and things like that, other states don’t have the options that we do. And with our kids, they may want to take electives or an advanced science or something like that at the high school when in a few years, because they allow that here in Idaho, they can do all the sports or take any amount of classes they want through the public school program. And my kids have expressed, they might want to do FFA or some of the advanced classes at the high school when the time comes. So with that, I need to keep track of what they’re doing. So if there’s a prerequisite for a science, they want to take, I need to be able to show that they’ve already passed, say algebra or something.

So I actually put together planner pages for us and I sell those on my website as well, because I think that they’re a really great tool and the way they work for us is I put down, I give them a printed out schedule that I’ve made on Excel. And then the kids write down in their planner each week, everything that they need to do, I have a place for either a journal or, uh, their four H story, which if any of you are fours, you know that it is a fight to get your kids to write their four H story at the end of each year. And they, I swear they can’t remember everything that they did. So on a weekly basis, I have my kids write out what they’ve done in four for 4-H that week. Now it might be a four H meeting. It might be that they walked their calf, just whatever it is, so that they can go back and look at that at the end of the year and put it in their record book. And it’s made it where they can make their stories a lot longer and more detailed.

Um, it also makes it where the kids can see what their week looks like. They can see if there’s doctor’s appointments, if there’s a four H meeting and so that they can also plan like, Hey, I have a doctor’s appointment Wednesday at one o’clock. So I need to get all my schoolwork done by noon so that I can get changed and go to the doctor, especially because they’re 13 years old. And a lot of times I’m working in my office and I’m not out there reminding them that they need to hurry up and get done every 20 minutes. Another thing I’ve done is put together research pages. I also have those on my website and those make it really great for showing additional studies that we’ve done. Um, whenever we’re doing a project, I can turn any project into a learning opportunity where we can talk about it and they can go do the research and document it on this page, come up with a plan and then I’ll actually keep those pages in a binder at the house.

And we use it like our homestead textbook for reference. So if like we have a sick animal and everybody will research, write it out, what the options are. We come up with a plan together with our vet and we put that information into our research pages. And then if we have another animal that’s sick like that. Again, we can go back to our own personal research pages and see how we handled it or what it looked like. And I mean, that’s worked super great for our homestead as adults and as, and for the kids. And another thing this does is if you’re in a state that requires showing how much work you’re doing, you don’t always have to do all your work. All of the kids’ schoolwork out of a book, you can do hands on learning, do research and show that you spent that amount, amount of time working on it and be able to keep that for your homeschool records, which I think is just super great.

So kind of what our year looks like this year, our teenager he’s 17. He got offered a job as an electrician’s apprentice, as soon as he turned 16. And my husband and I talked about it and school has always been extremely hard for him. I mean, just a constant battle. He didn’t feel like he excelled at anything. He didn’t have confidence in any of it. And he fought us constantly. So when he got offered a job as an electrician, as apprentice, my husband and I talked about it and decided that this was probably a better educational route for him than trying to do bookwork. So he’s been working for the electrician for about a year. He’s doing wonderful. His boss really likes him. He’s getting well known in our community as a really hard worker. And he’s decided that he wants to go ahead and pursue this and go to a trade school on becoming an electrician.

He’ll have to do it on weekends in order to do that. He has to have his GED in our state. So he’s been working on that one day a week. His boss has been really great about letting him take half days off to go work on his GED. And we’re super okay with this because college and standard education is not right for everybody. And our son is going to Excel doing what he’s doing right now. And he probably would’ve not done so great if we would’ve made him finish out his high school career. I, we, we are definitely proponents for hard work, hands on learning, learning the trades do what’s right for your kids.

So what our four year old is doing, we started preschool with him a couple years ago. He, I mean, he was ready for it at two years old. He was, you know, counting to 20, knew his ABCs and wanted to do school with his siblings. We started him doing IXL and reading eggs on his tablet so that he could do that with his older siblings while they were doing school. And it wasn’t something that my husband and I had to do super hands on with him all the time. Not that we didn’t do some hands on learning with him because he, we had lots of worksheets and counting beans and all sorts of things that we would do with him. But that was something that he felt like he could join in with his siblings and do that independent work. And he has just plowed through those programs.

I mean, he’s doing absolutely wonderful. He’s almost doing like third grade math on some of his ISL stuff because he’s been working on this for so long. Uh, while I was writing homestead science, my curriculum that I wrote, he worked through every single unit with me. Uh, and he’s loved every bit of that. It’s actually, I mean, it’s built his interest in what we’re doing on the farm. It makes it where he understands it, his ownership and wanting to help and what’s going to happen has just been amazing. In fact, that’s how I came up with a lot of my wording for advertising the curriculum because I, I just saw it come out in him so much. I realized that there was more to this curriculum than just learning about animals. That it’s about what it does for the child. And I’ve just been amazed by it. And it’s actually been what has been the turning point for me in writing the middle school version is that there’s problem solving and there’s character building stuff that comes with home setting so much that I’m encompassing all of it.

So for his pre-kindergarten work, he’s been doing the good and the beautiful pre-kindergarten and working on all about reading the pre-reading program next year, I plan on him continuing with those things, as well as some IL. And which is an, if you don’t know what IL is, I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, it’s an app for a computer tablet that works on math skills with the kids and they have to like keep doing it until they learn it. There’s a button that they can push that reads it to ’em, which is really great for our four year old, who can’t read yet, but can do math. So, um, he’s, we’re just going to keep going on this process with him. Um, we, we haven’t pushed him. He has came to us with all of this. He’s wanted to do this, and it’s just been really great to watch him learn our plans for next year with him.

He’ll be doing Saxon for math. I am a huge proponent of Saxon. I did it in school. The twins have used it. It’s a really great learning program. And I think I’ll, I’ll probably continue with my kids doing some form of Saxon all the way through our home school careers. I plan on him doing the good and the beautiful for English and science. I already have the mammals version. That’s a family learning one. That’s great for kindergarten through eighth grade. And so we’ve been doing it as a group. Um, I’m going to get, come back to what we’re doing for history. So what I’m doing with the twins next year, they’ll be in the eighth grade and this year I’m really going to work on them, making some of their own choices on what curriculum they do, because I really want them to feel like they have a part in their own education.

So I’m going to let them know what subjects and what they need to learn. Like for example, history this year, I think that they need to do some government and economics. So I’m going to let them go find their own junior high level government and economics curriculum. I’ll review it. And then we’ll decide if that’s right for our family or not. So other than their core subjects, they’re really excited about learning some computer skills. We have a slightly different electronics policy in our house, and I’m actually going to do a whole podcast episode on that in the future. On, from there, the twins are really excited to learn office canvas, Adobe, some video editing, photo editing. There’s a lot of these programs. And honestly, I haven’t found a lot of curriculums on those and I’ve kind of been putting ’em together myself while I’m also trying to write another curriculum.

So if anybody knows of a, some really good curriculums on those programs, please send them my way. Uh, I also think that we’re going to be going back to possibly a four day a week schedule just because now that they’re in the eighth grade, I feel like there’s a little bit, a few more topics they need to cover. Or I might use that fourth day just for life skill type things, which is their computer programs and stuff like that. Back to the history for our four year old, we are doing something really cool this year in the fall, we are going on a two week road trip. We never start homeschool until sometime in the middle of October. That’s when our school year starts, it gets us past harvest season. We get most of our canning and preserving done. At least all the stuff that can’t be frozen and has to be handled right away.

And then it makes it where we go right into hunting season with no harvest stuff to do. And the kids only doing school three days a week in the mornings, and we pretty much get to hunt the rest of the time. So that’s pretty awesome for us. But this year I decided to be a vendor at homesteaders of America. It’s a conference in Virginia that they’ve been doing for about six years now. We went last year and absolutely loved our time and decided we want to be able to take the kids this year. So we are going to rent a motor home. We’re going to take two weeks and just really take some time to see the country and let our kids see it. I mean, of course, gas prices permitting. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to start school a little bit earlier than we normally do, but it’s not going to be our normal structure.

It’s going to be learning how to read maps, how to do, you know, read road signs, how to do GPS stuff. And we are picking all of the historical landmarks that we want to see while we’re on our trip and I’m going to have the kids study each of those so that when we get there, they already know what they’re going to see. And I mean, they are so stoked about it. They are making lists of all the things we want to see. We have a laminated map up on the wall where the kids are picking sites that they want to see and we’re plotting them out on the map so that I can then take the Atlas with them and course our trip through that and try to catch as many of their points of interest as we possibly can. So, I mean, I learned how to do maps when I was about five years old, because that was when I did my first cross country trip.

And I’m just really, I mean, we bought an Atlas for our mother’s day trip and we started looking at it our four year old’s excited. My 13 year old son has always loved maps. So, I think this is going to be a really fun, new adventure that we’re doing. And I’m going to see if I can’t find some curriculums on learning maps. I bought some geo us geography games. I’m really excited to try. I’m going to also link those in the show notes. I, because I, I mean, I would love to just experience everything that we can in making this trip, like the best that we can, the kids asked if they could do some sort of scrapbook of our trip. And so, I actually had heard of something called smash books and I’m going to get big binders for them and put card stock in it. And everywhere we stop, if they get brochures or take pictures, I’m going to have a little photo printer with us.

Some double sided, sticky tape, lots of markers. And in between each stop where we’re just back on the road again, I’m going to have the kids put together their smash books. And when we get home, we’re going to have a really great scrapbook of their trip. And I’m super excited for it. I’m hoping to find a road schooler to bring on the podcast before the trip. So if you’re a road schooler or if you have one that you really like listening to, I would love to do an interview with them. Please message me at hello@thehomesteadeducation.com. And we’ll get that set up to kind of wrap up for today. I do want to say that I loved my educational journey. I traditional school all the way through kindergarten through beyond college. And I’m still a pretty staunch believer in traditional learning. I feel like there’s merit in it. Unfortunately I don’t believe in the public school system anymore.

You know, I did mention that I might let the kids take a few classes here and there. I think it’s good for their social skills. I think it’s good for them to learn from somebody other than me. And I think it’ll prep them for college, but I’ve learned so much about the different ways of learning. I believe in a more hands on approach. Everyone preaches that your homeschool doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s and that is so true. The best advice I give to any new homeschooler that I talk to is you don’t have to stick with something that doesn’t work for you and don’t let the guilt get to you. You’re doing it. And you should feel confident in what you’re doing. You can always reach out to me. Um, if you have questions, comments, inspiration, some of those curriculums I’m looking for please go ahead and, uh, email me. And if you have any questions, I would love to answer them on the show.