Sturdy for Common Things

This is My Home, This is My School

In the coming weeks, many eager, excited, and nervous kids will trade firefly nights and swimsuits for squeaky school hallways and backpacks. Back-to-School season is here, but for some, the new school year will start without ever leaving their home. A glimpse of life as part of a homeschool family is illuminated in a heartwarming, autobiographically inspired picture book, This Is My Home, This Is My School by Jonathan Bean (public library). In a show-and-tell manner, a young, homeschooled boy walks the reader through the dual purpose of his family’s home, his family’s dynamic, and the world around him. Each day is tightly intertwined with hours of love, labor, and learning- His mom and dad are also his teachers, his siblings are his classmates, similar to a school bus, their family van takes them on field trips, read-aloud at bedtime is an English lesson, and when the teacher is having a rough day, she sometimes has to phone in for a substitute.

The family of six’s rhythms and adventures as homeschooling homesteaders is a dreamy, organized chaos. Four kids running around, an energetic dog, chickens, a cat, a bunny, the house is  cluttered with projects– A lived in space, full of energy and a representation that learning happens everywhere and at anytime. This is the essence of homeschooling that Jonathan Bean effortlessly captures in this book.

Visit the library or your local bookstore and there are dozens and dozens of “back-to-school” picture books, but there are only a couple of picture books that feature homeschoolers.  2 million families homeschool in the USA, and with homeschooling on the rise, these children now have a book that relates to their own experience. As a homeschool parent, I deeply appreciate the telling from Jonathan Bean’s own viewpoint and especially his author’s note and family photos in the back of the book. You can tell just in the way the story is written and in his note that he looks back fondly at his time home with his family.  Our family’s own decision to homeschool our oldest child was a difficult one. We didn’t know the first thing about how the decision to homeschool would change the dynamic of our family and our lives, but the depiction of  Jonathan Bean’s own positive experience helped me imagine what life as a homeschooling family could be like.  My family doesn’t live on a picturesque homestead like Jonathan Bean’s (which you can read more about in his fantastic picture book, Building Our Home), but the approach is similar.

 

This Is Our Home, This Is Our School: A Look Inside Our Homeschool Life

In the same fashion of This Is My Home, This Is My School, I thought I’d share our homeschool “classrooms” and daily rhythms. As I mentioned already, this book helped me as a parent to visualize what life as a homeschooler was like before we decided to take the leap into life as a homeschool family. Here’s a peek inside our world.

This is our home, this is our school! We learn about a variety of subjects….

Reading

 

Math

 

Handwriting 

 

Earth Sciences

 

Engineering 

 

Cooking

 

Art

 

Music

 

Horticulture & Livestock

 

Theater

 

Yoga

 

Archeology

 

History

 

Not Pictured: Piles and piles of laundry, piles and piles of library books, playing with neighborhood friends, piles and piles of dirty dishes, extracurricular activities, early morning snuggles, chores, more laundry, and a whole lot of love.

If you homeschool or are thinking about homeschooling, be sure to check out This Is My Home, This Is My School. If you haven any questions about our homeschooling rhythms, I’ll do my best to answer your questions. I’m new to homeschooling myself, so if you have any words of wisdom going into the new academic year, please share!

Good luck to all students and parents going into a new school year!

 

 

 

 

*Copy of book reviewed provided by the good folks at Farrar, Straus & Grioux