Life Skills Learning in Summer | Homeschooling on the Homestead

C see show me your strawberries we have closed the books on our school year but we are still learning so many things from planting our garden to selling projects to reading together in the afternoons we're making strawberry jam we got our new chicks cooking together the learning is still happening and I want to invite you to join us our strawberries have been ripening this week and so we've been spending every day out there weeding and I find that if we do it all together in a group it doesn't seem so bad and if we do it in the morning that's also good because it's not too hot the kids um have been really great troopers at this this patch is enough it yields enough strawberries to feed our family of 12 for a year [Music] uh that one uh rag common rag what's the name of the in AIC asianic so while we were out here the kids were helping me pull weeds and we learned about what some of them are and we thought it was really interesting that we have different weeds coming up every year it seems this is a vine called Japanese hops alert we need and let's see this one is just common Ragweed and the last one we have growing in here is what is this ofon Lamb's quarters this is a real popular one we see around here everywhere strawberry all right what is what is this one this is dwarf mow dwarf mow and what did you find uh this one's wine CA saaria right there the mushroom yes okay wow how many did you get 46 wow that's a good start if you're new here my name is Sherry I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids we have one who's graduated we have seven in school and then a 3-year-old and a one-year-old we finished our book workk for the year on paper we homeschool from August through May um but realistically our learning is happening all year round it's it's hard to put it in a box and um it just looks a little different we don't do as much book work in the summer uh in the summer months but we are just learning a lot of different things for gardening we are preserving food uh my kids learn a lot of academic work during the winter months but during the summer it's a lot of life skills we have just under 4 acres of land here and on our property we raise all of the meat that we eat for the year so our chicken and we have pigs and we raised two pigs in exchange for beef with a friend of mine we also grow our own strawberries potatoes peppers beans beets Tomatoes corn uh lots of things and so this time of year is just really busy as that's picking up my daughter here got out the BB gun I just find it funny to to see what different things interest my kids each week it's like they all find a different toy and then everybody's into that for a week and then the next week it's something totally different I want to pause this video real quickly to tell you about the fill your cup bundle that launches this Tuesday May 28th this is a bundle that's for homeschool moms so you're not going to find curriculum you're not going to find things for the kids to do this is something that's meant to just encourage you as a homeschool mom when I think about all the curriculum that we spend money on in our homeschools and yet how little we spend on things that are going to help us as homeschool moms just stay the course and stay encouraged stay refreshed that's why I really believe in things like this things that are going to just encourage you and strengthen you give you ideas over 25 contributors have come together and put out their best best products this is 30 products over $700 worth in value that you can get for only $25 this launches Tuesday May 28th but you can get on the wait list I'm going to leave the link below you can get on the wait list to be notified as soon as it goes live I am really excited because I put in a brand new product it's an ebook called rest for the weary homeschool Mom this is a book with advice encouragement ideas scripture quotes that's all meant to refresh you as a homeschool mom so you don't want to miss this this is something that I would definitely have wanted back when I was starting homeschooling in fact I'm so glad to be a part of it because I have access to all these materials so take a look at the link below and get on the wait list for the fill your cup [Music] bundle so now it's time time to pick our strawberries and this is something everybody can do even the 3-year-old and our one-year-old he gets down and he's in the patch he loves it he just goes from one place to another and yes he squashes some of the strawberries but but we don't care it's so fun for him and the kids counted we got 420 strawberries and this is just the first batch we should get um hopefully at least two more of those can can we what can I get a bowl for a bowl yep you can get your own Bowl this one's kind of bad oh good yeah Mom can you some strawberries in here can you strawberries oh yep there you go this M this one is a b one no don't put it on the ground yeah but it's one oh did it have a r spot on it yeah that's the in the [Music] world on this day I actually wore Benjamin on my back because he was just into everything and it was easier to have him back there where he could watch and not be down and running off now sometimes um I'll give my kids the option they can either help with him or they can do the work with everyone else and depending on where we are some of them are just ready for a break and so they want to help with watching him or playing with him let me see show me your strawberries good job James decided he was getting tired of picking strawberries so he went off with Benjamin and was sitting right beside the patch just playing with him and it's so nice I love the close sibling relationships I love working together um doing something that's profitable for the whole family to since this is I think our second week since we were finished we've just had a lot of lazy mornings where we just we get started slowly and the kids some of them will be reading together or they'll be playing a game the little ones are playing on the floor and I like slow mornings so this is perfect for me I've really enjoyed the chance to get caught up on some of the work around the house and just take a little bit more care with homem making and cleaning out some closets um working on some projects that I had that I wanted to do working on some decorating and just kind of having the relief of the academic load off of me that we can just try some other things we are a family that does some thrifting we buy a lot of secondhand clothes and sometimes I've learned that things don't always fit exactly right and I think when you buy clothes this way then it can be really helpful if you get if you improve your sewing skills which is something that I've learned to do over time and so I had I bought this little baby doll style dress or shirt and it was just too wide so I brought it in and um when I did I actually made a mistake M AK with it and had to go back and correct it and I I find that this is how I've learned to sew I've learned more from my failures than from anything else it's one of those things that um I just I've made so many mistakes and I could have thrown in the towel sometimes I did but then a couple days later I might have picked it back up but you just you learn so much from just trying again when you can't get something and that's how sewing has been for me I don't do a lot of sewing but I've been enjoying having more time to do some of these things this week over the years I've really come to Value life skills learning more and more and I feel like this is a topic I could talk on and on about just all the work that we do around here during the summer we do a lot of gardening we raise as I said before our own meat and although my kids also learn a lot of academic skills throughout the year um it's these life skills learning that have just been so fascinating to me and I just I think that they are a helpful skill that they will use lifelong um when I think about all that our kids have learned from being here on our property we rendered Tallow um they learn how to use it to make um to blend it with essential oils to make moisturizer for their skin just knowing about putting something healthy on the largest organ of your body your skin we have a garden every year and we raise a lot of the vegetables that we eat our kids have learned what all the different seeds are they can recognize them they know when they should go in the ground when they'll Harvest um they've learned how to preserve pickles jelly corn beans beets applesauce peaches pears they've learned the hydrating Foods um they're here when we butcher our chickens when we they know how to package the chickens they know how we can we raise our chickens it only takes 8 to 10 weeks and they're done here we're doing a little bit of weeding uh we've given each of the kids a section of the yard that we are having them weed and we're paying them for this so they have their regular daily chores just around the house but the weeding we consider extra and we just need help with it so we've divided it up and we're paying them to do this so we try to go out once a day doesn't always happen but just go out before it gets too warm and if we all do it the same time just a little bit every day helps you keep up with it and I find that nobody really wants to start weeding but once we get going um it's just that initial start that's always the hardest once we get going everybody kind of gains the momentum and of course A lot of times we finish it off with just jumping in the pool and this is a great motivator to work really hard [Music] the unoxing um today our meat birds were delivered so we opened up the chicks and this is Benjamin's first time where are the chicks where are they they're not in the Boer yet they're in the Box look look [Music] what's in [Music] here look at this sh yeah be gentle over here buddy should dump what do you think what do you think so many things were going on today our 19 and 16-year-old boys mow our property that was happening um Aton was making bread and this is not a sourdough bread it's a yeast bread and it Rose so well because of the humidity and the warmer weather it was just the most beautiful loaf brenley wanted to make lunch she had some friends that were coming over and um so she offered to make sausage and rice and she did a great job this is a staple around here I have this meal probably at least once a week um it's one that everybody loves you'll probably see me make it on this channel a lot it's just four simple ingredients sausage onion rice black beans and cheese actually I guess that's five I added the onion we didn't used to have it with onion but um yeah this is just a delicious meal everybody loves it while Brinley was making this I went ahead and put together a salad for me and Nelson we love to have a salad at least once a day it doesn't always happen but um we just especially in the the summer with all the fresh vegetables we love having salad there's several reasons why we love to grow our own food um the first one is that we eat more organic fruits and vegetables uh grass-fed beef pork chicken without any hormones we know what is in our food we know where it comes from and that's just a source of peace for us by the way here's a little trick that I use to get my kids to eat vegetables whenever it's time for a meal or maybe like an hour before a meal I'll cut up some vegetables and put them on the table and that's all there is available and when kids are really hungry they will pick at vegetables at least if you do it enough a second reason that we love growing our own food is just that it gives our kids so much to do all summer I think they're a lot less bored because there's always some animal to look at something that's growing um there's just so many interesting things to observe I feel like our kids have learned so many skills from just the homesteading work that we've done here that even if they grew up and lived in a small apartment with just just a tiny plot of land or even having like a a deck patio Garden um they could grow still a lot of their own food and I I just think that's a great skill to learn how to do so when I am canning with my kids or preserving with them I'm not thinking about what we're doing just today I am thinking about the skills that I'm passing down to them as well good morning we are starting our strawberry jam this morning uh we have this that we picked from last night hopefully in the next couple days we'll actually be getting another one or two of these we did 50 pints of jam last year year so I'm hoping and we have four pints left over so I'm hoping to do about the same maybe a little bit less we have these jars we'll be bringing up jars today that we'll be washing um this is the pectin that I use I bought this 5 lb container of Honey um we'll probably use all of this and then some jar lids one of the first things that I do when I'm getting ready to do any canning is to completely clear the eyelid because when you're canning you need a lot of free space to just spread everything out so this morning our kids are going to be probably helping me wash the strawberries um some of the little ones love to use the Masher oh I didn't get that out but we use a potato masher and so the little ones will do that I'm pretty much the one that does all the the stuff at the stove um but they're involved in the washing and the mashing so we're going to go ahead and get started this video is pretty much going to take you step by step through our strawberry jam process I found a recipe that I make with honey a couple years ago I tried this several years ago like maybe 10 and I never could get it to set well I finally found a recipe that you can use with honey it sets really well I have it over on the blog rlif homeschooling tocom and I'll link it below if you want to try it back to the reasons that we grow our own food it keeps our kids busy that was the second reason and I I just feel like they always have something to do this time of year um it seems like we're always thinking about oh did you turn the water off and the hose did you remember to feed the chickens tonight oh do the pigs have water because if they run out of water um it's really serious like they they can't be dehydrated when it's really hot out there's just there's so many things to think about and it just keeps all of us really busy which is great for kids and I I don't think it keeps them too busy either it gives them just enough to do and then they can go and play and have a lot of free time so I I love this kind of lifestyle that we have the third reason that we like to grow our own food is just that it saves money and this is if anything this is a skill that's worth teaching kids learning how to economize and to make the best with what they have it still amazes me that you can take a seed that you saved from last year and for the first time this year we saved our corn seeds last year and we're planting them so we'll see how that turns out but it amazes me that you can just take a little seed and it can feed your family corn for a year you can just plant a whole field Little Field of Corn and it's feeding your family just from something so small as we were making this my older girls were actually able to step in and make the jam the part on the stove top our chickens love the strawberries so they've just they've just been feasting but the girls came in and they were able to finish the process with the jam on one of the batches because I was busy doing something else and um I think this is just because they're here every year year after year we've been doing this and they just know how it works they know what comes next and um I had to give a little bit of instruction but they've just seen it a lot so it's familiar to them we ended up getting 13 pints of jam from this and that's three batches which is actually not as good of a yield as I would have liked I usually get five pints from each batch so it should have been about 15 um but um the jam set really well and I was happy with that while some of us were working on the jam there were other kids that were outside my husband has been getting our garden going so sometimes he'll do part of it sometimes I'll do part of it um we're just always trying to get the food in the ground and keep up with everything thank you for following along with our family this week and all that's going on on our Homestead I hope this inspired you encouraged you I did a video last year on how I make our Jam just the step-by-step process where I you through it so I'm going to link that for you guys to watch if you want to take a look at that if you liked what you saw today I would love it if you would hit that subscribe button thanks for following along I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms [Music]