Homeschooling and Homesteading: 5 Benefits To Help Your Family Grow4 min read

Are you one of those families who like homeschooling and homesteading together?

Or are you just beginning to enter this gig with your little children finally growing up and getting ready to be schooled? Well, we’d like to warn you – it isn’t easy!

But at the same time, we’d also like to reassure you that it is extremely rewarding! (And many families who are homeschooling and homesteading will agree with us.)

Yes, there will be days where you wonder whether you have any sanity left, and other days you question if it is even worth it.

After all, you do have a fruit orchard, two cows, four ducks, six goats, ten sheep, dozens of laying hens, a bunch of house pets, and a huge vegetable garden… oh and your three kids… and a partridge in a pear tree!

With constant milking, weeding, planting, fencing, tending, and more, time is already very thin. You’re probably wondering about when you’ll get time to homeschool at all.

But amidst all the chaos and confusion, we want to point out that homeschooling while homesteading is indeed gratifying in the long run.

Your children would never have learned half the things they do if they had to go to a traditional school. When you include your kids in your homesteading activities, they learn so much!

5 Benefits of Homeschooling and Homesteading

Homeschooling while homesteading is super rich in lessons and rewards. Here are a few:

Your Kids Learn How to Work Together as a Family

When you’re on a farm with about a thousand things to do in a day, it can get physically and mentally exhausting after a point.

Where do you begin and where do you end? This is when you teach your kids to help around with whatever they can do.

Whether it is daily chores in the house or helping out on the homestead front, finding jobs and tasks that each family member is able, willing, and happy to do will prove beneficial to everyone.

You learn to work and pull together as a family. You realize that one single person cannot possibly do everything that is needed to run a farm and a home. Every member needs to pitch in and work hard. And no job is insignificant!

Your Kids Now Know Where Their Food Comes From and They Learn to Value It

When you live on a farm, it’s not a surprise that your meals do come from right outside your doorstep. So, not only do your kids know exactly where their food comes from, but they also know that it wouldn’t be nice of them to waste a meal that everyone worked so hard to put together.

They understand the true value of every meal and every bit of hard work that went not only into prepping the final meal, but also everything that came before it.

You are also teaching your children how to grow and preserve their own food, which is so awesome! Would they learn this in a traditional schooling environment?

You Model a Self-Directed Learning for Your Children

When you are farming and taking care of a homestead environment, there is a constant learning process taking place every day. Every day brings new lessons for your kids (and you too).

As you model this hunger for knowledge to your kids daily, they grow a little more. Ask them questions and encourage them to seek out the answers for themselves. If they ask you questions, guide them with everything you know.

Hands-on learning is one of the best ways a child can learn and grow.

Life and Death Are Not Mysteries to Your Kids Anymore

Growing up on a farm, your kids are witnessing new life, sickness, death, and decay. They are understanding what it means to be alive. They are facing the grim and inevitable reality of death.

This will teach them to cherish life. To understand how beautiful and precious it is. They watch amazing and tragic transitions on your farm, and this greatly helps them to navigate such big transitions in their own lives too.

Your Kids Are Learning Things That Are Above and Beyond What Any Workbook Could Teach

As we’ve mentioned, your children are learning important life skills and lessons that will help them in the long run.

Homesteading helps you to teach your kids various skills and take them outdoors where they learn, play, and grow. They get the right amount of physical and mental exercise that they require.

Learning more of those roll-up-your-sleeves lessons helps to reinforce more formal homeschool lessons.

Your children are not only learning what their workbooks would have taught them in theory but also so much above and beyond it!

The Bottom Line About Homeschooling and Homesteading

Yes, homeschooling is tough. Yes, it’s even tougher when you’re homeschooling while homesteading!

You could always opt for the easiest option and go with it. But what if you choose paths that align with your heart instead and make them easy?

Just like homesteading, homeschooling will also be one of the hardest things you do as a parent. But just know that for every little effort that you are constantly investing, your children reap lifelong benefits.