Of all that I've shared with you about how I manage our homestead, it is this post that I have dreaded writing the most. It feels so odd to say, in this country, in this culture, as a homeschooling mother, that the education of my children is not my top priority.

Have we not had it drilled into our minds from our youngest years that if we diligently apply ourselves to our education we can achieve anything? Childhood education has become an idol in our society to the point where nearly a third of our lives are devoted to attaining a decent and varied education that we may work our way into early retirement and follow after the pleasures of this world until our time has an end. I would propose that retirement is not the chief end of man.

Please understand, I love wisdom. I love knowledge. I plan to continue learning my whole life, but I'm not convinced that childhood education as we know and understand it really teaches anything or that our children truly learn anything. I happen to firmly believe that most of what I really know was learned in the classroom of life fueled by desire to know rather than my desire to do well on a test. 

Yet, we must provide our children with an education as it is commonly known these days and, for some of us, we have to be sure they do well on those tests. So once my children have their basic needs cared for, I'm sure to make time for their education. In our work-filled lives, I've managed this by following a few basic principles. 

{Setting Priorities}

I have discussed with you how feeding my family is my top priority in our home. Homesteading affords us the opportunity to not only be good stewards of our resources and bodies, but will hopefully instill our children with a work ethic without which any education is utterly useless.

I've shared how my next goal is to keep my husband and children properly clothed in the most efficient manner and how I further the goal of keeping our bodies healthy with a regime that ensures our home is at least mostly clean, and sometimes tidy.

Today, I'll share with you about how I've simplified and manage my next priority- Home education. 

When I search the scriptures, I see a great emphasis that the Lord places on wisdom and knowledge, making the education of my children next on my list of priorities as a home manager, but if applied correctly, we can see that those verses have little to do with physics, chemistry, or algebra. He desires that our wisdom and knowledge be of HIM, and if I remove Him from our lessons and make the science or math or history apart from seeing His design in the science class or the blessings and comfort of certainty and reliability we see in the math class or the Providential unfolding of His plan for the propagation of the gospel message throughout time in the history class, I have missed the mark.

In educating my children, my goals are quite simple. Perhaps too simple for many folks taste. But if my children reach their end and love the Lord with all their hearts, souls, mind, and strength with all that we believe as a family that entails, I will consider myself a success.

If my children have learned how to die to themselves and serve others, particularly those of their own household, those who it is easiest to be irritated by and servitude doesn't come as easily as it does when you see those who have genuine physical needs, I will consider myself a success.

If my children are taught to read, and write, and articulate themselves well, I will consider myself a success.

If my children reach adulthood with an inquisitive nature and know how to seek out the resources to satiate their appetite for knowledge, I will consider myself a success.

They can forge ahead in any direction they feel the Lord is calling them to without any inhibitions.

{Redeeming the Time}

Pull the Plug-

We stopped watching ALL TV. Weaned from cable, to network, to Netflix, to seasonal Netflix, to nothing. I admit to the occasional educational youtube, a subscription to Puritan Picks, and sometimes if I need a babysitter or bribe, they're picking their way through the Duggar's episodes online.  This time has been filled with working together on the homestead (or some days blogging :D ) I estimate that by pulling the plug we have gained an average of 6 hours a day. That's over 2,000 hours a year to be dedicated to "getting it all done." 

Be a Homebody-

We stay home. When you homestead or farm, you just can't pick up and take off often. Animals need fed and we all know weeds wait for no one! Vacations are often a thing of the past. The sad fact about homesteading and farming for most of us these days is the lack of community available to feed our social needs or help out with the chores if we go out of town. If you can gather with your family or friends in a messy, steamy kitchen over this year's corn harvest, putting it up for your winter needs or if you all join together on chicken processing or hog butchering day and use those many hands to make the work light, or if you have someone to tend to your chores while on a trip you are tremendously blessed indeed. For the rest of us, time away from home means we have to work that much harder when we're here to catch up. 

Manage Your Home Well- 

For me, the most effective way to do this is by utilizing a binder system, working it, and reworking it until it works for me. I'm not going to elaborate on that here as I've covered it quite extensively elsewhere, sharing many of the tools I use in order to make home management a breeze even in times of "crisis."

Little Ones Come First- 

It's easy to get wrapped up in some of the more exciting lessons you teach your older children and then swept away with the busyness of the day, but I've learned the value in making sure the little ones get their lessons in first. There has been more than one year where I didn't make the little ones the top priority and I firmly believe that I have two late readers as a result. Now, it is a relief to have those few, short lessons behind me and I'm amazed at the strides they are making to catch up and how well my new set of little ones are coming along. 

{Delegation}

I'm not going at this alone. Training my children to become an asset as young as possible is essential to running our household smoothly and applying the "many hands" principle helps to make our burdens light. You might be surprised to learn that I actually do a lot less of the work around here than you might think. 

I consider myself to be the manager of this homestead. I've been delegated the delegating. I'm very good at making lists, timetables, keeping records, researching, taking notes, etc... All ideas and suggestions are filtered through the head caretaker (my husband), but  he realizes that I get most bases covered and he has very little tweaking to do to the schedules. I let him know what needs to be done and when and then appoint everyone, including him, our work. 

Everyone has their tasks to do, some bigger than others, and even the youngest members of the family are given simple tasks and encouraged to hang out with mommy & daddy who love having help when they work. I'm finding that I have shockingly competent children who do a great deal to lift the burdens from our shoulders. Now if they could just keep things tidy while doing it.... 

{An Agrarian Calendar}

It's August and it's time to start gearing up for the new school year just 3 or 4 weeks away! The internet homeschooling community is abuzz with planning, talking about organization, curriculums, supplies and purchases, hopes and dreams for the year right alongside the rest of the moms around the country.

The problem following the contemporary school calendar poses for this homeschooling & homesteading family is that in 3 to 4 weeks, our harvest is just starting to come in! It's either sacrifice most of our harvest and all of the toil and sweat invested this summer or watch a new school year fizzle before it's barely begun.

I've been seeking a solution to this problem for a few years now, trying various modified calendars to find one that seems to work the best for our agrarian lifestyle. At first, I thought schooling "lite" year-round rather than more intensively for 9 months might be the answer, but learned that it's too difficult for me to stretch myself, trying to accomplish a wide variety of tasks each day. Becoming in tune with which season is my busiest, my next modification was to try taking our summer break during the harvest season- August, September, and October.

This was supposed to be our first year under that plan, but by mid-June I was already realizing that I'm busier during early summer than I had thought and I was feeling guilt daily. Homeschooling guilt while weeding the garden and garden guilt while working on phonics with the children.

My guilt-free solution: I'm going to finish this agricultural season by operating on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday/ Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday system.

On MWF, we'll work on lessons, completely ignoring as much as possible all non-urgent homesteading commitments. Feeding, watering, milking, and pasture rotation, if necessary, will all still be taken care of, but weeding, harvesting, processing, etc... will not. Those tasks will be reserved for the other three days.

I'm not willing to permanently commit to it until I've finished out this season, but it is with great caution that I report that I'm quite pleased with it so far.

There has been no guilt. It has been a real comfort knowing that even though I really should thin the kale and weed the rows in the fall garden but can't because the children need to do their lesson, that I will be out there taking care of it tomorrow. And vice versa.

And for the most part, I'm staying on top of my work. If it continues to go this smoothly and stress-free, I would be interested in trying next year to school MWF June through October and full-time November through May.

Following an agrarian calendar will look different for each of us and our different situations, but really, isn't being able to tailor-fit your schedule to meet your families needs one of the most wonderful blessings of homeschooling?

{Simplify}

Since I love the Charlotte Mason style of education, I decided to really work at devoting small sections of time to each subject and integrating as many subjects as possible with the Bible being our primary source of curriculum.

Yesterday, I shared with you that this might be considered one of my most successful homeschooling years to date. While we are meeting most of my goals, that's not to say I'm where I'd like to be. Since the baby was born, I've fallen away from any form of guided nature studying. I would call it more like teachable moments nature studying. The children don't sketch nearly as much as I'd like... some are even starting to bellyache when I suggest it.

Essentially, what I've done is look at all the different subjects I was trying to cram into each day or week and simplified them by combining them into as few subjects as possible. I had a sort of epiphany and realized that it seemed foolish for me to have a grammar lesson, writing lesson, reading lesson, spelling lesson, dictation lesson, enunciation lesson, history lesson, literature lesson, and poetry lesson during separate times, using separate curriculums for each lesson. 

Why not just use the Bible?? 

Having the children take turns reading the morning devotion, paying mind to their enunciation, writing the daily Proverb verse for copywork or  using the Psalms as poetry for dictation, looking for spelling errors for them to re-write. Using living books from history as our literature instead of twaddle or fantasy. 

What I ended up with is Bible, Literature, Writing, Math, Science, Phonics, Art, & Life Skills.

As simple as it is for me to work through with the children, explaining it might end up a bit more complicated, so tomorrow, Lord willing, I'll try to share more about this new integrated approach to lessons and how we use the Bible as our primary education resource.