Play is My Childcare

My toxic trait is severely underestimating my to-do list while simultaneously dreaming even bigger dreams and, being as I perpetually believe that every bullet point on said to-do list will take me precisely one hour to complete, I manage to convince myself that the to-do list and the big dreams are possible. Spoiler: They’re not. They’re not possible.

…or are they? I guess I’m still trying to find out.

I’m not entirely sure what this article is about, but I’m eager to thank everyone who has subscribed to Wildflower Field Notes - thank you! - and to share a bit about what I’ve been working on this summer.

I started creating Nurture Wildflowers Homeschooling in 2020 - it started as a very simple course about play-based learning in the early years. In 2022, we made a somewhat last minute decision to skip kindergarten enrollment for our oldest son, opting to homeschool instead.

My husband wasn’t sold on homeschooling, but he quickly changed his tune when he realized kindergarten would have more iPad time than play-time.

With this green light, I dove headfirst into creating a (screen-free and actually play-based) kindergarten curriculum for my son. The only problem was that I was 20 weeks pregnant and living in a small apartment with a 5 year old and a 3 year old and a husband working around-the-clock investment banking hours, with no family nearby.

I couldn’t think. So, I booked a month-long vacation rental, packed up the kids, and drove 9 hours to a little cabin in the mountains. Nearly every day for four weeks, we would wake up, eat breakfast, the boys would play outside while I built the foundations of my homeschool program - which I actually built here on Substack - then we would eat lunch, walk to the lake where I would read various education books and jot down notes and ideas while the boys played, and finally return to the cabin for dinner, baths, and bed-time.

It was a good system - a system I had also used the previous summer when I was turning my pilot motherhood course into the initial iteration of Mother Wildflowers.

Feel overwhelmed. Impulsively book cute and peaceful-looking vacation cabin. Solo parent in mountains for a week in order to ironically be more productive. Breakfast - play/work - lunch - play/work - hike - dinner - baths - bedtime - late night work - repeat.

Reset nervous system. Make memories. Accomplish an impossible mountain of tasks.

It’s a GOOD system.

Anyways — I realized I couldn’t learn and create everything I needed to learn and create in a month. So instead, I wrote the foundational introduction course, a weekly newsletter template, and a promise to share the in’s and out’s of our first year of homeschooling.

Each week for a year and a half, I shared an ‘Agenda’ newsletter and a ‘Journal’ newsletter. The Agenda outlined my plan for the week, a seasonal recipe, a seasonal activity, and the toys, learning materials, and children’s books I would be using that week.

In the Journal, I detailed our previous week’s homeschool subjects: practical life, outdoor play, social play, drawing/ emergent writing, nature adventures, and enrichment activities. I then shared observational assessments about my children’s play and how they tied to state learning standards, tips for homeschooling with a new baby, and tidbits about our goals, what was working well, and what I planned to change.

In the fall of 2023, I shared my Waldorfish approach to introducing the alphabet in 1st Grade, and come the holiday season, I was up to my nose in reading wars research and building an actual homeschooling course and curriculum for ages 6-8.

The funny thing is — I really thought I just needed to do the one thing, then the product would be complete.

I just needed to finalize the reading instructions.

I just needed to finish recording the math lessons.

I just needed to tweak the instructions slightly for Grade 2.

Oh. how. very. wrong. I. was.

Every year around this time, since that blessed naive day in 2022 when I had the bright idea to create my own kindergarten curriculum, I stare at my computer for 14 hours a day for weeks on end while my children flitter around me, and last year — with a fresh newborn dozing on my chest to boot.

Thankfully my husband now works from home as well, in a more flexible role, and keeps everyone fed (fed, not entertained!) while I’m in my ‘work holes'.

The thing I didn’t realize in 2022 was that I was walking onto a 4-year-long conveyor belt with no stop button, no way off but through.

Summer: Research my oldest son’s upcoming grade level and put together a rough plan

Fall/Winter: Experiment, adjust, experiment, adjust, experiment, adjust

Spring: Shape grade level into a coherent plan, write lessons, record video examples

Early Summer: Frantically update the entire beast of a curriculum so that families can begin prepping for upcoming school year

Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade

4 years later… I DID IT. I Reached the end of the conveyor belt (well, almost).

My experience and expertise is early childhood, and my master’s degree in curriculum and instruction covered grades K-3. I’ve always felt confident that Nurture Wildflowers Homeschooling is strictly an early childhood curriculum, but now that I’m here with my 9 year old, I feel emotional about how beautiful and ideal this approach really is.

We very intentionally take a slow (albeit structured and effective) approach to reading, which meant he didn’t begin reading fluently until Halloween of last year, two months into his 3rd grade school year and 3 months before his 9th birthday. In Waldorf Steiner, we often hear about ‘The Nine Year Change’ and oof! I’ve seen it so clearly this school year.

My oldest son morphed — physically, mentally, and emotionally — from a little boy to a big kid, perhaps even pre-teen, in the last 8 months. He’s reading fluently and confidently. He’s approaching his lessons with a new air of maturity. He’s officially reading to learn rather than learning to read. He’s writing beautifully and creatively.

He’s a 9 year old in 2026 who loves reading, who loves learning, who loves playing, who loves his siblings, who fits in seamlessly with his baseball team and is competing to be the star quarterback this football season — despite being a screen-free homeschooler.

Ending Nurture Wildflowers at Grade 2, which had been my original plan (and which I had been seriously tempted to do multiple times while drowning in 3rd grade research), would have left him floundering in a curriculum he wasn’t cognitively or emotionally ready for. I now see so clearly that continuing through Grade 3 and supporting him through his Nine Year Change was the equivalent of giving him roots and enabling him to spread his wings.

He’s now ready for any 4th grade curriculum. More importantly, he’s ready for life.

Now that we’ve trialed and errored each grade level while also tweaking our general homeschooling routine and approach over four years, I’m finally feeling like Nurture Wildflowers is finally nearing ‘complete’ (a small part of my brain is laughing at me for writing that — yea right! it says).

I just did a year’s worth of work in a months’ time, and I thought you might be interested to know what I’ve been working on:

• I studied and listed Grade 3 Common Core Math & Language Arts Standards to make sure Nurture Wildflowers (NW) was checking off all of that and more.

• I browsed and purchased multiple 4th Grade Math and Language Arts homeschool curriculums to make sure there wasn’t an academic gap between NW and other curriculums.

• I studied numerous spelling books and word lists and created 36 weekly lists based on NW phonics lessons, then designed a weekly spelling rhythm for students to begin once they’re able to read our list of 270 sight words.

• I wrote 17 story-based grammar lessons for Grade 3, inspired by Janet Langley and Jennifer Militzer-Kopperl’s Englishland stories in The Roadmap to Literacy.

• I designed a weekly writing rhythm that allows students to practice reading comprehension, planning, writing, composition, proof-reading, grammar, sentence structure, paragraphs, critical thinking, and more — across Grades 1-3.

• I started this Substack (yay!) and experimented with Notes.

• I updated my website and the Nurture Wildflowers info page.

• I recorded 50+ lessons with my 9, 7, and 3 year olds, then edited and uploaded video examples to nearly every lesson throughout the digital curriculum.

• I finalized instructions for the NW Language Routine (the core of our curriculum), including journal formatting instructions for child-created lesson books:

• I added my children’s work samples to each grade level, including my 3 year old’s:

• I updated our carefully curated materials lists.

• I updated our planning and tracking templates.

• I created ‘cheatsheets’ to help families understand exactly what they should be doing for each grade level.

I’m not quite finished, but we’re leaving for our summer vacation so this will have to do for now.

Here’s what’s coming later this summer:

• A few missing video examples

• An updated course tutorial

• Grade 3 math lessons

• 45 nursery rhyme videos with my 3.5 year old

• 20+ child-led learning videos with my 3.5 year old

• 35+ form drawing lessons with video examples

• 4th grade curriculum reviews and recommendations

• An entire website of our favorite children’s books

In the fall, I plan to resume weekly seasonal recipes and seasonal ‘invitations to create’ while also building our science, history, and social studies archive.

So I’m not quite off the conveyor belt yet, but WE DID IT, and I’m trying to let myself celebrate a touch despite the still possibly impossible to-do list.

I created (and taught) all 4 grade levels, while growing and birthing two more babies, and we did it without childcare, screen-based entertainment, or household help (aside from my husband who has a full-time job and spends an absurd amount of time at youth sports with the big kids).

Breakfast - play/work - lunch - play/work - nature - dinner - baths - bedtime - late night work - repeat.

It’s been very hard, and I’m currently very tired, but we actually did it, and the curriculum is good. It’s really, really good.

Yes, I’m bragging. I’m proud of myself. I’m proud of my family. I’m not sorry. And I also can’t help but wonder — does Caro Claire Burke know she’s the angriest of The Angry Women? Or, in her mind, does she somehow other herself from all the women of the internet who hope there’s a tantruming child, an abusive or idiotic husband (nothing in between), educational neglect, a nanny or two, a wealthy father-in-law, and a sprinkle of anti-depressants behind the scenes?

I digress.

Sending a virtual hug and an enormous THANK YOU to all of you who have been homeschooling along with us over the last four years — asking questions, offering feedback, encouraging me to continuously improve, and ensuring that I didn’t give up (without you, I surely would have) — and another thank you to everyone who has already subscribed to this newsletter.

I promise I have a long list of articles that I’m excited to write, but I have to prioritize carefully and there’s only so much time in the day.

Off to celebrate my 4th baby turning a year old, and to enjoy a much-needed sun-drenched week at the lake with my husband and babies.

WE DID IT!