He’s Learning More Than It Looks Like

What homeschool kindergarten actually looks like once you stop looking only at the schedule.

A few weeks into kindergarten, our schedule still exists, and I still like it. The Good and the Beautiful has been easy for us to move through, field journals have worked well, and co-op is easily our favorite part of the week.

Our actual days just don't look nearly as neat as the schedule I made for them.

Some days we get through everything I planned, while other days Khari spends five hours with me at the farm. We still haven't made it to the library even though I faithfully put it on the schedule every Tuesday, and I'm starting to see just how much of his education happens in the spaces I didn't schedule at all.

“Can I stand up and pay attention?”

At co-op, K–12 comes together for Harambe, our time for announcements, community lessons and gathering together. One day, one of the girls in Khari's class, who is six, wanted to stand up instead. Naturally, her mom told her to sit down and pay attention.

Khari's classmate asked, “Can I stand up and pay attention?”

Her mom said sure.

I loved that interaction because she wasn't refusing to listen. She was asking if she could listen her way.

Someone else might have considered it talking back, but to me, it was healthy. She understood what her mother expected of her and felt comfortable enough to advocate for herself without being disrespectful.

That's something I want for Khari. Following instructions is important, and so is learning how to function in a group, respect other people and recognize when it's time to settle down. But I don't think we have to remove a child's autonomy to teach any of those things.

I'm thinking about that more now because I'm figuring out how Khari pays attention, too.

Sometimes listening doesn't look like listening

Khari moves a lot, and there are times when I'm watching him during a lesson and I'm almost positive he hasn't heard a word. Then something comes up later and he makes the connection immediately.

In Nature in Spanish, his teacher brought marigold/calendula while they learned about Día de los Muertos. We had just harvested marigold seeds from the farm, so that got his attention immediately. Suddenly, he had something he already knew to attach the new information to.

I've noticed that moving while he's listening seems to do something similar for him. It helps anchor what he's hearing, and I recognize it because my brain works like that too.

If I'm sitting completely still listening to someone talk for a long time, eventually everything starts running together. If I'm drawing while I listen, though, I can remember what I was drawing when I heard a particular part of the conversation. That visual and physical memory helps me find the information again.

So I'm trying to give Khari tools instead of constantly telling him to use his eyes and ears.

He's still five, so some of his movement is absolutely distracting, and we're working on the difference between movement that helps him regulate and movement that takes him or someone else out of the lesson.

The question becomes less How do I make him sit still? and more What can he do with his body that helps him listen without making it harder for everyone else to listen?

That's a skill he'll need much longer than he'll need kindergarten.

What counts as school?

If I only documented the curriculum we completed this month, I'd leave out most of what Khari has been doing.

Capoeira is his favorite class at co-op. It's led by Baba J and his wife, Mrs. Clarissa, and sometimes their daughters come too, which is something I really appreciate because Khari gets to see and learn from a Black family together.

The class is active, but it isn't just about getting energy out. They're learning discipline and awareness, he gets some Portuguese, he plays instruments, and he's learning how to move his body with control and in relationship to the people around him.

Nature in Spanish gives him another language through things he already understands—sun, flowers, herbs and plants.

During life skills, he helps me with whatever chore I'm already doing, and laundry has been the easiest thing to hand over. At first, he did not want anything to do with folding clothes, but now he'll fold entire loads by himself, which is great for his development and, more importantly, a huge help to me.

I'm not above admitting that part.

I don't want “life skills” to mean I invent a child-sized task so I can say we practiced responsibility that day when there is plenty of actual work required to keep our home and our life moving. He can learn by becoming increasingly capable of participating in it.

Right now that's folding laundry, and one day I fully expect him to wash it too.

His current sources of income are farming and losing teeth

After our five-hour farm day, I paid Khari $5 for working with me. The Tooth Fairy had also recently come, so he had $8 altogether, and like other 5-year-olds, he wanted Chick-fil-A.

I don't buy Chick-fil-A anymore, but he has his own money now, so we talked about his options. He could spend his $8 on a meal and have nothing left, or he could wait until he had $16 so that, if he still wanted to spend $8 on Chick-fil-A, buying one meal wouldn't take everything he had.

We put $3 into his money box for savings, which left him with $5 available and another $11 to earn before reaching his $16 goal. It turned into a lesson on earning, saving, spending, delayed gratification and math without me ever needing to sit down and announce that we were doing financial literacy.

As far as Khari is concerned, working at the farm and losing teeth are currently his two streams of income. He had another tooth that was already pretty loose and decided to pull that one himself, but I wasn't about to let him turn the Tooth Fairy into a business model, so that tooth earned him Hot Wheels instead of another cash payment.

The schedule didn't fail. I just had to account for real life.

The biggest difference between the homeschool schedule I made and the one we're actually living is Tuesday.

Mondays are long because Khari has co-op and, once that's over, I work my part-time job until 11 p.m. When I originally built our schedule, I could see open hours on Tuesday and filled them because technically there was room. What I couldn't see on the schedule was how I would actually feel after Monday.

On Tuesday, I don't want just another full day, so I've stopped trying to make it one.

As long as we get through our curriculum, I'm satisfied. I've started doing my own work beside Khari while he does his, which has become a good recovery day for both of us. He works through school, I work through whatever I need to get done, and we're together without either of us needing the other's full attention the entire time.

Field journals work well for the same reason, and so do art and the building activities he likes for STEM. I've become a big fan of educational activities that allow him to work independently because, conveniently, his independent work time can also become mine.

We still haven't made it to the library, and at this point I'm pretty sure the problem isn't the library; it's that I scheduled it for Tuesday. So we'll move it.

Our homeschool menu has worked the same way. I'm glad I made it because having a reference keeps me from having to decide what we're eating from scratch every day, but I don't need Tuesday's lunch to actually happen on Tuesday for the system to be useful.

That's probably the biggest adjustment I've made since we started: our systems need to make our lives easier. If maintaining the system becomes another job, I've missed the point.

Co-op has changed the picture for me, too

One of my favorite things about co-op is that it's all hands on deck for the babies, which means working moms actually get to be working moms for a few hours. I can hand my child over to people I trust, know he's doing something worthwhile and use that time for what I need to do.

Being around the other families has affected me in ways I didn't expect, too.

These kids are smart, but not just academically. They're curious, comfortable speaking, interested in things and given room to be themselves. You can tell their parents pay attention to them, and you can tell their parents invest in them.

I'm also around mothers who have full-time jobs and homeschool. Their children eat real food, they travel and have experiences, and their parents have careers while still making intentional choices about how they want their children educated.

Seeing that has made my own vision feel much more possible.

I don't need a lot for myself, but for my son, I want a lot. I want him to eat well, travel, know how to grow food, fold his own clothes and eventually manage his own money. I want him surrounded by people who look like him, and I want him to have an education that takes him seriously without rushing him out of childhood.

I also want stability, and I've realized those things don't have to compete with each other.

Building the infrastructure

With the growing season ending, I've been thinking a lot about what comes next, and for the farm that means infrastructure. This year made it very clear that growing things is only one part of farming; the systems around the growing matter just as much.

I'm starting to think about my life that way too.

Now that I know I can work and still have a hand in Khari's education, I've been looking to continue my career with a remote position. I want to establish myself in an industry I care about, where I can contribute to something outside of myself, while also creating more stability for us and for the farm.

Our bills are paid and life is good, so this isn't about waiting for a salary to make my life feel legitimate. For a long time, I was trying to figure out what I wanted my life to look like while also chasing a check, and now I've built enough of the life to finally see the picture.

The farm is here. Homeschool is here. The work I care about is here, and our little routines are starting to become our normal.

I'm not looking for money to tell me I've made it anymore. I'm looking at what we've already built and asking what kind of work can help me sustain it, which feels like a completely different perspective on working.

I'm laying infrastructure in both places, (preferably the kind that can't be eaten by cucumber beetles and harlequin bugs.)

Meanwhile, Khari is learning Portuguese, folding laundry, counting his dollars, harvesting radishes, making art, figuring out how his brain works and negotiating with me over Chick-fil-A.

None of that necessarily looks like kindergarten when you put it next to a traditional school day, but when I look at the whole picture, I'm not worried about whether it does.