Educating your child for a self sufficient life style

[herb girl]

One of my passions as a mom is to educate my children to be self sufficient as much as possible.

One of the most important ways in which I accomplish this is to practice what I preach, of course, and to be passionate about continuing to educate myself.

Below are some of the ways I teach my kids (and others) about the homesteading urban/rural life.

I buy BOOKS, and lots of 'em! I use them as reference and we also take out a lot at the library.

We watch videos (Patti :) ) and others and do research about all manner of topics on the net.

We garden as a family and cook as a family as much as possible. I start them as early as two years old helping as they can.

I give them their own garden responsibilities.

We follow current events related to homesteading/gardening. For example: the evils of monsanto, NAIS and they do reports on these subjects.

I encourage my children in developing areas of expertise. My oldest daughter is the compost queen of the family and loves to start all the new gardens and anything to do with flowers, my 14 yr. old loves anything mechanical (tractors and the like) and horses, my little guy(5) loves to plant and harvest and is WILD about the chickens and taking care of the chicks.

We visit living history museums to really see first hand how they did it in the olden days.

My husband teaches all of them building skills and DIY projects.

We preach resourcefulness in all areas and FRUGAL living.

We try to add one new animal a year to our homestead (we added too many at first and nearly killed ourselves).

I try to get my kids involved with like-minded mentors. Right now my oldest daughter is studying bee keeping with a friend who is a master at it.

We do fun craft projects in the winter with materials we've dried/saved
on the homestead throughout the year. Nature crafts and such. This helps them be enthusiastic for "next year" and thinking about what they can grow.

In the winter we make list after list of what we want to grow from the myriad of catalogs we get in the mail.


So.....just curious, what do you do with your kids to get them excited about this homesteading/gardening life?

I'd love some more ideas!

[plantoneonme]

I garden with my granddaughter who will be 4 next month. This little girl has a passion for anything to do with gardening. We had many successes and a few failures this year but will continue on next year. We started early last spring by starting seeds on papertowels in zipper bags so she could see how seeds germinate. We talked about what germination means and she could then see how the (bean) seeds made roots and then plants. In the spring she helped me move an entire 5 yd dump truck load of dirt into new raised beds. She has good quality tools just sized down to her size and moved the dirt shovel for shovel that I did....as a matter of fact, she was a little slave driver and would not let me rest until the entire pile was moved LOL. As part of her learning we talked about the different plants as they grew and later were harvested. She learned the names, spellings and how to write the names of the vegetables. We also cooked with the different veggies together. For fun we also made our own board game and you rolled the dice to move forward. If you landed on certain squares you got a card that said things like "you remembered to put the weeds in the composter move forward 2 squares" or "you didn't water the plants today move back 1 square".

Together we also grew some plants such as radishes, beans, and rhubarb and took them to a local food bank for kids under 6 for them to try...some children have never eaten a fresh vegetable and thought they all come from cans.

Right now we are trying and experiment to root different things from around the house. After my surgery I received a couple flower bouquets and we are trying to root the roses. I did this in the past and hope to get a couple out of them. We are also growing tangerine seeds. We made little homemade greenhouses for the plants and are currently talking about how greenhouses help us grow plants at different times of the year.

Even though she is not quite 4 yet, we use proper terms such as propigation, germination etc. We talk about what the words mean and she gets to see how they are spelled and writes them out herself.

I am hoping (but not counting on it) to get a couple of bantam chicks or quail next spring so she can see how to raise the birds for eggs.

Oh yeah, she was completely and insanely afraid of bugs last year to the point of not wanting to go outside if something flew near her. She is getting much better as we talk about good bugs like bees and lady bugs, and bad bugs (which we get to squish) and then as she says the best are butterflies "because they kiss girls".

I am planning on next year getting back to canning so that will be a large area of teaching for her on preserving food for future use.

Always thinking of new things and would love to hear ideas from others also. Kim

[greenmama777]

It's so wonderful to read this thread. My little girl is only 16mo but I want to homeschool with the same thing in mind. Seeing this post gets me excited to find others who feel the same. It gives great ideas, too! This is the art of living and it's good to know it isn't lost! I wasn't brought up this way but I am so drawn to it and so I find I'm learning new things constantly as a mom and I look forward to continuing to learn along side my daughter and any other babies that might come along! :D My philosophy can be summed up in a quote by Pablo Picasso who said, "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

[nnyxmfan]

we use our garden as a science project, math class and to plan what they want for dinner or to have as snacks and the like. we use graph paper to graph and design garden. plan what we have room for. we always leave space for a crop of something unusual... this year its different colors of tomatoes, pumpkins, and watermelon. we try to estimate the harvest and they measure the plants sizes and keep track of how they sprout. They learn about composting and now want gardens of their own. sandi