If you’ve ever tried to get a nine-year-old to sit still and do fractions at a table, you know it feels a little like pulling weeds that just grow back the next morning. That’s why I stopped fighting it and started slipping schoolwork into the homestead itself. It’s sneaky mom math, and honestly, it works.
Take the chicken coop. Ethan wanted to know how many eggs we’d get in a week if each hen laid one egg a day. Suddenly, fractions and multiplication made sense because he could hold the answer in his hands. No worksheet ever made his eyes light up like counting out twelve warm eggs did. He even started predicting egg totals before collecting them, just to see if he was right. That’s math, science, and a little bit of gambling rolled into one.
Then there’s the garden. Measuring spacing between tomato plants? That’s geometry in action. Estimating how many pounds of papayas we picked? There’s your word problem. And when the basil bolted faster than I could blink, we got into a whole biology lesson about why Florida heat is unforgiving. He soaked it up while holding a handful of wilting stems. Real life has a way of sticking better than any textbook.
Josh laughs because even chores become part of “school.” Washing jars for canning? That’s home economics. Feeding scraps to the compost pile? Environmental science. One morning Ethan asked if we could weigh the banana bunch we’d harvested and compare it to the last one. I didn’t plan that lesson—it just happened. Which makes me think maybe the homestead is the teacher, and I’m just the assistant.
Homeschooling here doesn’t look like a tidy classroom with neat little desks. It’s messy, sweaty, full of dirt under the fingernails and math scribbled on the back of seed packets. But watching Ethan learn by actually doing, instead of just memorizing, feels right. He’ll forget a worksheet by next week, but he won’t forget the summer he figured out how many pounds of mangoes it takes to break the bathroom scale. And honestly, neither will I.
