I’ve been a homeschooling mom since I had school-aged kids. That started 15 years ago.

Over the years, quite a few people have asked us about my curriculum, or what our homeschooling day looks like.

I always tell them, “You’d be underwhelmed.”

If you are familiar with homeschooling curriculum, you know that you can buy some pretty insanely amazing packages. I mean, I want to get these and read the books and do the activities. There are moms that do amazing unit studies and have fantastic setups. Some days, I wish I was them. I’m just not. I’m a completely underwhelming homeschooling mom.

I literally buy workbooks off Amazon (Spectrum, Brain Quest, Complete Curriculum, Handwriting Without Tears). I let the kids pick from various subjects, which ones they would like. I try to stay under $30 a kid. Yep, no $900 set up for me. We subscribe off and on to some online programs (IXL, Reading Eggs, Teaching Textbooks) depending on what the kids are liking. The rest of our homeschooling is what many people refer to as living life.

Trust me. I’ve panicked, wondering if I was doing enough. Maybe I’m totally ruining their life. Okay, that may be true, but I’m finally convinced, it won’t be because of homeschooling.

Every year I question myself up until recently. Now that I’ve been doing it over, you know, a decade, I feel pretty confident in our process.

The results seem to be okay.

It’s hard to share your process until you know if it works.

My oldest went into public school as a high school junior and graduated a semester early and earned some college credits and did some advanced classes in the year and a half she was in public school. My other two high schoolers, who decided to start public school as a freshman and sophomore, are both getting great report cards and in accelerated or AP classes. So, academically I’m not sweating every day or beating myself up that I didn’t prepare them well enough.

And by academically, I mean they are well enough versed in the system to do well. How well the education system works for actual learning is another post for another day. Let’s just say one of our local valedictorians thanked Quizlet during the graduation speech. If you know, you know.

But back to the topic at hand.

Homeschooling.

Here’s the thing. School is a tool to prepare our children for life. Do you know what else prepares your children for life? Living. A lot of learning actually happens pretty naturally.

Okay, I actually lied about not sweating homeschooling.

Last year my then five-year-old hated school. Hated it! He didn’t want to do anything that we called school. He had a magic gift of disappearing when it came time to do “school,” meaning sitting down at the computer to do some lessons or complete some workbook pages. I was trying to be cool about it, but I was panicking just a little, even though I had already done this five times before!

This year has been a complete switch because somewhere in between, he learned that learning was fun. However, a lot of his learning doesn’t take place at “school,” when we formally sit down and have lessons or complete assignments. He’s found a love for numbers and now we literally talk about numbers for hours on our drives. Maybe it’s not hours, but it feels like it.

There are other unexpected places we’ve done a lot of learning.

A few days ago, we went on a hike up a local canyon. His sisters are in a one-day-a-week school, so it was just the two of us.

Let me share with you some of the things we learned, practiced, or reviewed on our hike.

Numbers, Time, and Time Management

We planned to leave for the hike right after we dropped his sisters off as it was in the same area. Unfortunately, someone forgot their shoes. It was either me or him. I’m not going to throw anyone under the bus though. We talked about our options and decided to go back to the house to get shoes. We talked about what time it was, how long it was going to take, and how we likely would not have as much time now. We discussed how long his sisters would be in school and what else needed to get done during the day. For a 15-minute car ride there and back, he happily and willingly talked about time and numbers. And, gasp, applied the information. That’s a super important piece of learning, by the way.

Emotional Management

You might have heard that learning about our emotions and how to manage them is something kids are not learning in school today. That’s okay because the great news is, as a parent you are in a perfect position to teach emotional management. When I learned he forgot his shoes, I was a little annoyed and he was a little upset. But, we worked through it. Yes, it changed things. Yes, emotions occurred, but we both talked about how to get through the situation and found a solution that worked for both of us.

All this learning happened before we got on the hike. Yep, just in living life.

Science

Fall is coming and he knew just what the leaves changing color meant when I pointed them out and what season was coming next. He’s done the workbook pages where you pick which clothes to wear, or identify seasons by the pictures. But seeing it in person is pretty great and a little more real and applicable. We saw some unusual orange growth on a log and talked about what it might be and how we could figure out what it was.

Health and Nutrition

He knew if he was going to get snakes on the hike, he would have to bring it. I told you, my parenting is underwhelming and even more so at child #6. So he prepared us snacks for the trail. Apples and cheese, sliced oranges (don’t panic, I helped slice them), and of course Cheetos (cause you gotta get a little junk food in there). He brought enough for both of us. That’s good learning about planning and nutrition, and learning how to feed yourself well. This is a pretty useful life skill that, let’s be honest, a lot of adults don’t have and it is fairly harmful to their health and life. But, you don’t really see that on many curriculums.

Creative Writing

As we hung out having a snack in the canyon, he told me rock monsters were coming. We then had a whole “class” creating a story, using our imaginations. It was complete with identifying our superpowers, along with the dogs that were with us. He even practiced cause and effect (something his 6th-grade sister was doing in her workbook just this week), as he kept pointing out how everything was turning into rock monsters that one of the dogs touched because that was her superpower. Let me tell you, the story was detailed and even I was having a hard time keeping up and remembering it all, but for him, it was no problem.

Nothing he was doing was out of the ordinary for a six-year-old, we just don’t always recognize the many ways and ideas are children are learning and developing every day in the world around them.

Decision Making

I literally just got paid some good money to write a section on decision-making for a curriculum for high school students. My six-year-old practiced it in real life as he picked several of the trails we went on as we would hit different forks. He decided on the shorter trail, but he added in a lookout point his dad had shown him. It’s great to read about decision-making, but do you know an even better way to learn about something? By actually doing it and then seeing the results. His opportunity to make real low-risk decisions will help him learn how to make complicated high-risk decisions when he is over.

There was nothing spectacular about our hike.

I didn’t even set out beforehand intending to do any teaching, or for my six-year-old to do any learning. It was only as I was thinking more about it, that I realized, this is what a large portion of my homeschooling curriculum has always been.

Children have a natural curiosity to learn, and much of the time we only need to open the doors and be there as a source of information for their curiosity.

Whether your child is homeschooled or not, don’t underestimate the important learning they do, every day, just by being with you and learning from you. All you really need to do is be a willing teacher when curiosity is sparked.

Most learning in life, and I say this with confidence, takes place not at a desk or computer, but in our daily life. I went to 18 years of schooling and feel pretty confident that while school was great for me, I’ve learned more outside of school than I did inside school walls, and I was 100% public schooled all the way.

You know one other great thing you can do to inspire learning in your child?

Read to them every day! That’s a plug, I just had to put in.

Click here to learn more about how you can be your child’s teacher through everyday conflict.