Barn schooling??
It is what it sounds like – getting an education in a barn! This can be a fantastic supplement to your educational format. There are countless benefits from working in and around a barn. Here are five that are well worth sliding on the barn boots and grabbing a shovel.
Bonding and Empathy
My oldest two children are 8 and 15 years old. That’s a 7 year difference. Even with such a large gap between their ages, each child has learned to depend on the other while barn schooling. My oldest has had to extend her patience to both critters and her brother while she’s measuring out feed and supplements or asking her brother to help her measure feed. Other times she’s got to wait for her brother to complete a task that would have taken her less time to do. Over time they have learned how to work together to do the chores needed to care for a barn full of horses and cats.
Both my son and daughter each have their own horse. They have become aware of the fact that these animals have feelings. They need respect, love, and care. The greatest reward for them and me as their mother is to see their horses bonding with them. My son’s pony and my daughter’s horse prefer them to anyone else. They look to them for comfort and offer love and comfort back. My eight year old trained his own pony for riding this summer. Before he could even begin training, he had to join up with him and prove to his pony that he was worthy of respect, love, and a bond. I watch those two boys in the round pen. When my son knows he has his pony’s attention, he turns his back on him, smiles from ear to ear and listens for the familiar sounds of his little hooves walking up to him. The smile doesn’t fade as this youngster runs around the pen with a pony close at his heels. When the saddle and riding training began, the bond they had formed created a way for them to learn each other very quickly and speed the training process up to a very successful level of riding within weeks.
Responsibility
My kids are solely responsible to be sure that these animals are fed, cleaned, healthy, and properly secured in fences or stalls. One slip up could mean hungry horses, colicky ponies, or loose or lost animals. Animals give children opportunity to hone their sense of responsibility.
Fitness
Another wonderful effect of barn schooling is the exercise and weight lifting my kids do. Do you know how much a wheel barrow full of manure weighs and how strong one must be to wheel it through mud to a manure pile and then lift it and turn it over to dump it? Neither did they until it became their job to do. Saddles are also heavy and must be put away over their heads on saddle racks. My kids have increased their muscle mass and my daughter has slimmed down several sizes in only a year’s time.
Incentive
Since my kids love to go to the barn, see their horses, and groom and feed them – I can use this as an incentive to do other things they don’t want to do. Before we can go to the barn, our house pets have to be cared for, school work needs to be complete, and sometimes the vacuum needs to be swung around or dinner has to be prepped. I have gotten helpers in the kitchen I least expected simply because they wanted me to hurry so I could get to the barn with them. The kitchen garbage miraculously goes out, the living room gets vacuumed while I’m sautéing onions and the laundry incredibly ends up on my bed in neatly folded piles while the hamper load decreases – all because they can’t wait to go work in the barn!
Learning Focus
I watch my son, who was normally bouncing off the walls and wiggling all over the floor while working on his times tables, now sitting quietly on the couch with a marker in hand and a white board full of problems being completed. My daughter has learned to work through her fear of challenge through her work with horses and translated that to her essays and math assignments.
Teachable Moments
My favorite part of barn schooling is the impromptu lessons: “Let’s see what kind of spider that is, Mom!” “Did you see the tadpoles have gotten their legs now?” “How do you age a horse by his teeth?” “What is Cushing’s Disease?” and various other questions that require research and result in papers or projects to display what they’ve learned. With both my children learning to train and break horses, they have become quite opinionated and are constantly critique horse magazine articles, giving me subject matter for assignments.
Barn schooling has exponentially assisted in my children’s academic development as well as their character development.
Don’t have a barn? Here are ways you can still incorporate barn schooling into your lives.
- Find someone with a barn and make a connection. Perhaps your kids will be allowed to “hang out” with the animals in exchange for helping with various chores.
- Try horse riding lessons. The same benefits described above – bonding, responsibility, fitness – can be the result of regular horseback riding.
- Raise chickens. Most places – even in town – will allow you to have chickens. Kids enjoy feeding and gathering eggs and will reap many “barn benefits.”
- Apply these principles to the animals you already own. Take a hard look at how your kids interact with the pets you currently have. Could they take more responsibility? Could you facilitate greater bonding or use your pet as a springboard for learning?
Lisa Blauvelt (with her family and three dogs, two cats, a horse, pony, donkey, two red eared turtles, a fluctuating number of tadpoles and baby fish, and various other creatures collected by her adventurous boys) puts her education degrees to work at her home in the Deep South. There she teaches not only her own children, but others who come to her home to learn. Her decade long experience in teaching children to read will soon be published as a 476 page guide for parents.