Special Guest Edition: How we homeschooled today by Stephanie Garrood

I’m

Stephanie

, a radical homemaker, part-time sommelier and writer around the edges. I am married to my best friend Daniel (ironically we met in school) and together we are unschooling our two children, aged 6 and 3. We live on the Mornington Peninsula, Bunurong Country, at the bottom of mainland Australia in a small house surrounded by a big edible garden, filled with fruit trees, raised veggie beds, perennial herbs, flowers and five cheeky chooks. It is here, in this house, on this land, that we are co-creating our family culture. We live simply, slowly and in tune with the seasons and value creativity above almost everything. Our days are guided by the tenets of art, nature, books, music, community and food. How we live and learn looks nothing like school, and home is at the centre of all that we do.

We are family-led learners—everyone’s interests and needs (adults and children alike) are taken into consideration when designing our days. No two days ever play out the same way so choosing just one example to encapsulate the way we homeschool seems like an impossible brief but I’ve chosen to share what a slow autumn Tuesday at home looked like for us recently to give you a glimpse into our world.

Tuesdays are always home days. These are some of my favourite days because even though we have nothing we have to do, I’m amazed on reflection how much we end up doing, in an unhurried, naturally unfolding way. Having the space in our week to go with the flow and attend to our home and garden is much needed too and we all benefit from these languid, quiet days, cocooned in connection with one another. Here is a summary of what a typical week looks like for our family before I dive into the miniature of this particular Tuesday.

On Mondays our daughter attends Farm School, which is a big social day for her. Together with some of her best friends she plays freely outdoors for 6 hours straight on an idyllic local farm property. It’s heaven for kids, but it’s also a lot, therefore a rest is much needed on Tuesdays. I also work on Mondays so my parents spend the day with my son, which is a lovely generational bonding day for him. On Wednesdays we have our weekly co-op adventure day where we gather with more of our homeschooling buddies to explore wild places & spaces across the Peninsula. You can read all about our co-op here. Thursdays we’re at home again. If we feel up to it, we will also do our library and toy library run for the week. On Fridays we attend our Permaculture Playgroup, which rotates through different friends’ gardens. The adults all pitch in to help with garden tasks the host is wanting to tackle and the kids, you guessed it, play. We all come together to nature journal over morning tea at the end. On Saturday mornings our daughter attends her weekly ballet and jazz ballet classes. Saturday afternoon is sacred family time as this is the only day of the week that neither Dan or I are working so we prioritise being at home, usually in the garden, all together or out in nature nearby. On Sundays I work and the kids get a whole day 1-on-1 with Dad. My job, whilst being out of the home, still allows for slow mornings and I’m home to read with my little ones as they drift off to sleep in my arms.

How we homeschooled today:

This morning I awoke in my son’s bed, as I do every morning. He steals me from my own bed at some point each night back to his bed for snuggles. It doesn’t help my sleep deprivation that our children are and have always been early risers. It’s mid-autumn here on Bunurong Country and the sun doesn’t rise until around 7am but this doesn’t stop my daughter from being the first out of bed each day somewhere around 5:30am. She happily entertains herself in the wee hours with nothing but her imagination, but once our son is awake the demands for breakfast follow shortly after and it is my husband who is up cooking porridge for them both.

I relish this precious little pocket of time before the day kicks in, and this morning I lay in bed while the kids had breakfast and read for a little while. Lately I’ve been experimenting with slipping out to our garden studio to write between 5:30am-7:00am, to make the most of these extra hours in the day before my husband has to get ready for work. But today I lingered in bed until my son coaxed me out of it.

Once up, I came out to the living room to find my daughter had finished her 3-in-1 Creator Lego she received for her birthday over the weekend and had made a seahorse. She wanted to show her best friends who are currently living in the UK for 6 months. They have been sending each other sweet video messages, so we recorded a new video to send to them. She then begged me to read a Cat Kid Comic Club book by Dav Pilkey (another birthday gift) aloud to her so after eating breakfast and brewing a big pot of coffee I sat down on the couch and read with her. We haven’t read this style of book before (comical, more pictures than words, but ultimately an endearing message) and she was absolutely enraptured. We had to finish the whole thing then and there and as soon as we did she said “Read it again!” So we started from the beginning again until my son, who had been playing with his toy cars around us for the most part started scaling the pantry looking for his second breakfast. I told her we should put a bookmark in so I could help her brother.

Whilst I sorted out what will be the one of many, many snacks for my son for the day, my daughter went straight to grab pencils and paper and set about drawing her own comic. I sat in the armchair beside her and picked up Aaron Slater, Illustrator which just happened to be within arm’s reach and read it aloud while she drew and he played.

After we said goodbye to Daddy as he headed out to work for the day (he mostly works from home but Tuesdays is his regular office day), the kids watched Andy’s Wild Adventures and the new Bluey episode The Sign which aired a few days ago. I suspect a daily re-watching will be on the cards for the entire week. I had planned, as I always do when the kids are watching TV, to read my own book (I’m so close to finishing Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel) whilst polishing off my coffee.

But my inbox and to-do list were weighing on me, so I took the chance to attend to some life admin instead. Next my daughter got out the paints as she wanted to make butterfly prints and my son and I set up a train track on the living room floor which he played with for a little while before destroying.

We remembered that we also had a new Letter from Afar to open so we dove into the world of Nizwa, Oman by way of Isabel’s correspondence and used our Children’s Atlas to look up where Oman is in relation to the rest of the world. We searched for the flag and matched it up with the one in our pen pal’s letter and had a general flick through, chatting about what we came across in the Atlas. Isabel told us about her encounters with camels, date palms and desert living. We have only recently begun receiving these beautifully-illustrated monthly letters and they are a great way of discovering parts of the world together. Anyone, anywhere can sign up to receive them here.

Next up, another book, this time Happily Ever Crafter—Dinosaurs. These are a great series of simple children’s craft books which we borrow from the library and my daughter decided she wanted to make a volcano. We didn’t have any plastic cups as the instructions called for, but being gardeners we have plenty of plastic pots, so she gathered her supplies and got to making.

Throughout the morning my son comes in and out of the house, amusing himself and asking for food. We unlock our backdoor as soon as the sun comes up as he loves and thrives being outdoors, roaming around the garden, digging, playing with his cars and trucks, bikes and balls, swings and slide, trampoline and chickens. My little nature boy is in his element in the elements. I couldn’t imagine him in a school setting, being restricted from being outdoors for lengthy periods of time and being coerced to sit still when all his body wants to do is move. At home he is free to be outdoors as much as he pleases, barefoot, hands in the mud, cheeks kissed by the sun or glistening with rain drops.

It rained on and off all morning today. In snatches of time between books and craft and play, I was able to make all of our beds, tidy the kitchen and get a load of washing on. After lunch my daughter asked to listen to her stories. Ever since she was little and stopped napping, she has listened to audiobooks in the middle of the day if we are home. She absolutely loves pottering around her bedroom, making art, playing with lego, flicking through her book collection and dressing up, all whilst listening to stories. My son on the other hand, was straight back outside. He is not one to rest or stop for anything! So after I got my daughter set up, I headed outside too with my little boy to poke around the garden, let the chooks out to roam and soak in the sunshine that has emerged after the morning’s showers. On inspection, the last of the carrots looked ready to be harvested so together we pulled what was left in our plot and I began dreaming up what dinner from the garden would look like. We mucked around in the garden for a little bit longer before rounding up his sister to go on a nature walk. We donned our raincoats, wet pants and gumboots and set out to see what we’d encounter.

Fungi season has just begun and every year we look forward to the return of magical mushrooms sprouting up all around us. We play a game we invented a few years ago called “I Spy Fungi” which has us heckling to one another to come and witness our findings. I use the iNaturalist app on my phone to take a photo and try and identify the mushroom and we also have a paper print out guide that our local shire produced last year which is great for the kids to try and visually match what they discover. Yesterday my son and I spotted puffballs nearby so I was keen to show my daughter this patch too. We stopped at our local playground for a quick swing, seesaw and slide before scanning the ground beneath our feet once more. We did find the puffballs and a number of other interesting specimens, but the fungi fascination was soon eclipsed by another childhood wonder—puddles!

By sheer luck my son happened to splosh a good one that lay beside the road, and as the water accumulated in the gutter channel, it began winding its way like a small surging river towards the drain further down the way. Within seconds we were all captivated by this trickling stream and my little scientists’ imaginations began firing. They started finding sticks and leaves to dam the flow, in other sections clearing debris to help the water stay the course. They splashed more puddle water to increase the down current and used their bodies as alternating tunnels and roadblocks. We spent the next few hours stalking the streets, seeking more puddles that lay in alignment with the road that we could splash and observe and tinker with, our attention fully attuned to the varying speeds in which we could make the water wind.

This may seem like the simplest of ways to spend a Tuesday afternoon but in this circumstantial experiment I got to witness my children’s brains on fire, their bodies interacting with the natural elements and the manmade structures we forget exist. So much scientific learning was being absorbed and imprinted in their minds from this humble interaction. I didn’t feel a need to drill them on the physics or ask them to explain in great detail what they were witnessing. I knew in this moment it was not my role to teach, but to keep an eye out for oncoming traffic, allow them the space and time to stay in this bubble of fascination and be their equally curious cheerleader. It’s in these humble moments, doing the sorts of things you just can’t plan for, that I am the most grateful for this lifestyle. To bear witness to my children enraptured with the world, working and playing and learning together. It feels like striking gold.

We find our way home eventually and the ideas I had earlier about dinner come to life. We tuck into our homegrown carrots, pumpkin & sage roasted with local honey and served simply with quinoa and sautéed greens from the garden. Daddy is home not long after dinner and runs wild with the children whilst I get the kitchen in order, before we all shower together and settle into bed for books. I’m reading with my son at present so we read a selection of his choice of picture books before he falls asleep in my arms and my husband reads a chapter book with my daughter before she too falls asleep with him.

Once the kids are asleep, Dan and I get to hang out and catch up on each other’s days and then read our own books before we too are fast asleep.

~

So that’s a little look into a day in our homegrown, homemade, homeschooling life!

If you would like to connect and read more about the simple pleasures of our slow and seasonal home-centred life, you can find me here on Substack at Splendid To Be.

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Many thanks to Stephanie for sharing a day in her family’s life! If you’d like to be next, please get in touch. Everyone is welcome, whatever kind of home educator you are. You don’t need to have your own Substack either! I’m especially keen to hear from more families with teens—if you know anyone who might like to take part, please pass this on.

And if you’re new to How We Homeschool, you can find all the previous Special Guest Editions here. Here are three you might have missed:

Jamey Fisher-Perkins, on a winter day with her two children in Wales.

Joel Bowman on the lessons to be learned from homeschooling while travelling.

Mary-Anne Horley on education at home and on holiday with her son, 10.

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