What Really Counts as Learning in Our House

(Spoiler: It’s not 30-minute timers and color-coded binders)

When I first started homeschooling, I had a vision.
It involved laminated charts, freshly sharpened pencils, classical music playing in the background, and children who sat still.
Adorable, right?

Yeah. That fantasy lasted about a week.

The Schooly Brain I Had to Unlearn

As a former early childhood teacher, I had a hardwired belief that “learning” only happened at a desk. With worksheets. And maybe a song about long vowels. If we weren’t checking boxes, I was sure we weren’t doing enough.

But then real life stepped in. Specifically, twin boys—one with autism, one with ADHD, both with zero interest in my lesson plan. Add in chickens, RV trips, sensory chaos, and my very persistent need for coffee, and let’s just say: I had to let go of my Pinterest classroom dreams real quick.

We Learn Everywhere, All the Time (Whether I’m Ready or Not)

Let’s be real: our homeschool happens in the weirdest places.

Over pancakes at IHOP
In the driveway with sidewalk chalk
On road trips, while dodging spilled Goldfish
At Dollar 1.25 Tree while trying to do mental math with sticky quarters
During deep, existential garden debates like “Is it actually worth growing tomatoes?”

If we waited for a “perfect” school setting, we’d literally never start. So we learn wherever the moment hits—and honestly? That’s when it sticks the best.

Baking, Budgeting, and Planetariums (Oh My!)

Recently, my boys got space-obsessed. Like, ready-to-apply-to-NASA obsessed. So what did we do?

Cleared out the library’s planet section
Watched kid-friendly space documentaries in our pajamas
Made not one, but multiple trips to the planetarium
Had long debates about whether Pluto should be reinstated as a planet (spoiler: they vote yes)

Was it messy? Yes. Was it loud? Obviously.
Was it science, reading, vocabulary, and geography rolled into one? You better believe it.

When the Guilt Creeps In (and Why I Tell It to Sit Down)

There are days when we’re done by 10:45 AM and I think, This can’t be right. Shouldn’t they still be diagramming sentences or reading silently in a cozy nook?

Except… no.

We’re not managing 25 kids or taking 20-minute transitions to find a glue stick. We’re learning with focus, on their level, at our pace. And that means we can get in, dig deep, and wrap up in way less time—and still be thriving.

So when the guilt gremlin shows up? I hand it a juice box and tell it to chill.

**Here’s What Actually Counts as Learning in Our House:**

Baking cookies while accidentally teaching fractions
Feeding chickens and deciding who pecked who
Mapping our RV route and calculating gas money (with snacks factored in, of course)
Gardening while discussing compost, plant lifecycles, and how to keep goats from eating everything
Grocery shopping math wars: “Guess how much these bananas cost” edition
Budgeting breakdowns at Dollar 1.25 Tree with sweaty dollar bills and big decisions to make

And yes—absolutely yes—to listening to audiobooks in the car while someone loudly crunches veggie straws in the backseat. That’s language arts, thank you very much.

This Is Learning. And It’s Enough.

Our homeschool doesn’t look like the one in my teacher training binder.
It looks like real life—messy, noisy, beautiful, and ours.

Some days it’s full of hands-on science. Some days it’s just surviving with a side of math. And some days it’s tears, grace, laughter, and a whole lot of “we’ll try again tomorrow.”

And you know what? That all counts.