Author: D Verderaime

It is often over thought out or formalized when starting a home school, just like when you start a homestead…we buy pre-made everything, feed, structures, feeders, etc. In homeschooling we immediately go out and purchase expensive curriculum or enroll in some online tool that does all the work for us…or so we think.

The Learning Day – All Ages

• Let your children see you reading, writing and discussing what you yourself are learning.

• Read from the books you are reading to all your kids, and be sure to discuss what is learned, what is intriguing, and how it relates to your lives. Discussions are the primary tool of learning in the home. Include even the youngest who is capable of complete sentences.

• Give your children active roles in the running of the home and business; these must be age appropriate. Every child is an apprentice from the day they are born, because they learn everything from you.

The Learning Day – Pre-Literacy Ages

• Read to your younger children, ask them about the story. Let them read parts of it to you, even though they are only regurgitating what they have memorized from reading the book for the 30th evening in a row.

• Sing the ABCs, or play songs that do so, but it is ideal if the songs have some fundamental phonics included (i.e. “The A says a”, “The B says buh,” etc.). Once they can sing the ABCs, start slowing down the reading time and show them how to sound out the letters. It is crucial for sanity’s sake to assign partners to read to the younger kids as well, as the skills to teach will be needed when they are parents.

• Have the children begin to copy letters from handwriting booklets, you can make these with handwriting paper bought at the store, or get marker/chalk boards. When they can do this, have them copy words. After they can read the words they copy, then have them copy sentences from the books that are read to them. You can also have them begin to write stories of their own, using phonics rules…don’t fret misspelling so as to not discourage. The copying of sentences and words will fix this eventually.

• Have the little ones, that are learning to count, keep track of how many eggs were collected, when they seem to have the one to one correspondence down, start asking them questions about how many eggs we need for everyone to have 1 egg today…then when they got that, ask how many we need for the whole week. Let them work it out for a while on their own with as little guidance as possible, perhaps keep cartons labeled with the days of the week, or in our case several cartons per day as we are a family of 16. Anytime you are working out numbers for feeding, harvesting, etc. include the “littles” in your process.

The Learning Day – Post Literacy Ages

It is at this time learning to read is coming to an end, and reading to learn is beginning.

• This is when daily discussions about what the kids are reading is extremely important. When you have to explain what you read it enforces retention and comprehension.

• It is also important that reading religion, philosophy, history, science and economics content to all your children occurs. Sit them all down in the living room or dinner table, read and discuss excerpts that you read out loud.

• For the skill based content, like math, physics and chemistry, there are copious amounts of online resources to drill these concepts.

• For your children learning arithmetic, simple drill of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing various types of numbers (i.e. decimals, integers, fractions, etc.) will be enough.

• Include your children in construction projects and have them learn measurement of boards and angles of attachment.

• Include them when you calculate feed macro-nutrient percentages, or scooping ratios for the feed.

• Fractions, proportions and cooking are essential skills for all kids.

• Let them build with building blocks, boards, pallets, etc. They will gain an intuition about Geometry and logic even from a very young age.

The Learning Day – Secondary School Ages

It is now that your children’s wisdom is really taking off.

• You will really need to identify with them what their strengths and talents are, and let them take off with those.

• The formal teaching of logic and rhetoric are very important at this time.

• They can begin self teaching all the subjects and keeping common place journals where they put all the notes, concepts and definitions into them.

• In these journals it is important they write mini essays where they follow the Feynman technique or an equivalent technique to self-assess their own understanding. All the reading and discussion up to this point in their life will make this much easier.

• Mathematical Sciences and the Humanities will be enforced with the Feynman technique by its unique ability to develop rhetoric, the art of effective writing/speaking.

• Logic will be foundational so that coherent, consistent thought will be produced.

• The creative arts should be encouraged, and there are online resources for these (i.e. art, music, storytelling, etc.)

• Basic statistics should be taught, but this is dependent on strong foundations in logic. This is just to prevent the lies and distortions in the media from being blindly believed.

• Applied Geometry and Basic Algebra can enable critical thinking and life skills in managing a homestead…but if their is mathematical aptitude, it is highly encouraged to pursue mathematics as a philosophical way of thinking and approaching the world, so advanced mathematics can be taught for its own sake, just like philosophy or the natural sciences.

Key Take Aways

This broad outline is intentionally non-prescriptive, so you can buy the books you want your kids reading, and the books you wish to read and share with them. Also, for mathematics and science so much is available online. The New Peasantry is developing curriculum guidance and resources for the humanities, mathematics and natural sciences, that enable parents to guide their children’s learning.

Home-schooling and processing my own firewood are the very catalysts that led our family to homesteading. My wife and I had been teaching in the public school system for nearly 7 years before starting our home school. I had already been blocking and splitting our own firewood for heating our home. I followed You Tubers like Buckin’ Billy Ray and Farmhand’s Companion to learn about wood processing. From FHC, I discovered the beauty of having a milk cow. I wanted one. We were going to get one. Suffice it to say, the journey to homesteading began with homeschooling, and now it has led to home business. We are coming home.

There are so many things coming home has done, and continues to do, for our entire family. The lessons learned in homeschooling have been many. The most important lesson learned for educating our kids has been accepting that each child has unique gifts and abilities. We have spent lots of money purchasing different curriculum for everyone to do, only to quickly adapt and allow for a mixture of many resources to generate a love of learning for its own sake. In fact, the more rigid and scholastic the less the kids get from it. The deep and simple conversations we have as family about life, history, science, economics are what last in our children’s minds…not copious amounts of book reports that suck the life out of novels and history books.

The next would be that the homestead is rich with learning experiences, and must be central to a curriculum. Not everything has to be on paper with a letter grade…although having children write, draw, paint and sing about it, is excellent, and best done organically, not by rigid force, since the purpose of education is not found in utilitarian control. Not formalizing activities to death encourages love of learning. For example, on the homestead, the scientific method is learned quickly and intuitively through trying things out with an expectation of an outcome, only to learn that something else may work better, or not at all.

• Like learning that red light spectrum does much more for winter egg laying than bright white lights;

• A buck and two does in a rabbit colony doesn’t always work out;

• Dairy cows give birth in 279 days and their belly’s drastically change shape right before calving;

• Diet chemistry is extremely important before, during, and after calving.

There are so many more things to touch on that the traditional classroom cannot provide in the empirical sciences.

The last I will touch on, but by no means the end of the list for homesteading curricular resources, is the familial bonds and relationships grown in the home. The trials, tribulations, consolations, joys and losses are shared by a small community joined through deep love. This cannot be taught in public school. The reasons?

• Not enough time,

• Homogeneous group of individuals forced into rows and columns or small groups,

• No allotment for free learning as recess is reduced more and more or its formalized and controlled,

• Everything scheduled and focused on the clock, and finally

• The kids go home to spend only a couple hours with family where there is very little structure for solving problems together…at least not without contrived and scheduled force.

Simply put, the home teaches compassion, generosity, and forgiveness like no other institution.

Subscribe and follow us as we guide other families through the great triad of subsistence life: home school, homesteading and home business . We will be providing curriculum guidance and teaching classical education courses to help you guide your children for very little cost.

Education can be free and public, it doesn’t have to come from a government or private school.

Introduction

The yeomen of ancient times produced food on their own land, on a Lord’s land, traded labor or goods for food, or found themselves destitute simply begging and consuming what others produced. We are all farmers of content, or simply consumers of content, or both.

Digital Content Creation as Subsistence Farming

We, like these ancients, find ourselves in an analogous situation. We plant digital content, channel the waters of traffic to this content, the followers consume, and if they are grateful enough, they repay the growing tree with the compost of money. In this context, and if you ever grew anything, you know that compost, good compost, is GOLD.

I do not want to overstate the connection between digital subsistence and real subsistence. The two forms of sustaining ourselves are inseparable in my journey, which is the great marriage of digital farming and actually raising our own food. This has become my obsession to live a simple and sustainable life.

Sustainability

Sustainability has become a chronically under-appreciated concept in my life and “career.” As many who continue to experience job layoffs in the tech industry, egg shortages in the grocery stores, and the extraordinary instability in the economy, both globally and at home, we are faced with some choices to make.

• Continue to go to work for an employer or start our own business

• Continue to depend 100% on the grocery store or grow what we can and depend on community farmers

• Continue to have our children trained to provide narrowly skilled labor to employers as wage slaves, or educate the whole person to be a free person, a free thinker, who adapts and thrives.

These choices are not comprehensive, as you will see in my future posts, because so many sacrifices and decisions make or break our journey to sustainability.

What Can We Do?

Ultimately, we are being called to produce fruit, whether that is actual, digital or both. The industrial age is gone, this new digital age does not have room for a career mentality as it is forcing us to engage with our own replace-ability. We are too expensive as senior employees to keep in the corporations, and only a small number are needed to guide and coach the much cheaper inexperienced hires, who also struggle to get work as the more experienced junior employee is sought after…so what are the too expensive, too old, or too new to do?

Join The New Peasantry…the New Digital Revolution

Join my family and I, as we discover the answer to this. We are farming our homestead, forming our children for entrepreneurship rather than a career, through homeschooling, and developing products and services to help those who join us on this path. There will be struggles, successes, losses, and failures…but I am certain joy and peace will be at the end of this. Blessings to my digital and local community who join us…and to all who are undecided.