Preparing for PEP Homeschool:
As my wife Rachel and I were considering how to do PEP for homeschool, we had several big questions:
A. Are our kids interested enough in permaculture, especially the areas that are outside of our existing experience, to embrace this new idea?
B. Are the PEP philosophy and badge skills close enough in alignment with how we do things and what we need done that working on them would contribute to, rather than detract from our homestead as a whole?
C. Is there enough opportunity to complete PEP badges on and around our farm for our kids to actually earn badges and make progress?
D. How much homeschool time would we devote to PEP, and how much PEP would we be expecting to accomplish in that time?
E. What homeschooling would we stop doing to make room for PEP?
F. How would we provide the knowledge, tools, and materials we don't currently possess that would be necessary to complete many of the badge bits?
G. Where would we start?
Here's a summary of how we addressed these questions in order to move in the direction of feeling comfortable enough to launch this very unusual homeschool adventure.
Rachel and I had to get some answers to questions B-F before we could even consider doing this. I spent a lot of time reading through the badge information, mostly in the physical book, and reading them to Rachel when we were on the road together. There were many skills and descriptions that took some additional research for us to know what was being talked about. Accessing the website along with the book was very helpful with this. I also discovered R Parians
PEP BB Calculator and purchased it for our household. That really helped us visualize the full scope of PEP.
The badge bits we reviewed fell in to several main categories:
- Tasks our family does every day or fairly often already
- Tasks we wished we had the time, equipment, materials, skills to do, but don't
- Tasks we are fairly unfamiliar with and don't know enough to see the value of
- Tasks that don't mesh well at all with how we do things
After this review, it was clear that the PEP skills were compatible enough for us to consider using it for our homestead and home school.
During our review, I actually tagged which of the sand level skills could be done on our homestead right now with the equipment/materials we have. That helped me answer C. Our kids could ten sand badges with the critters, growies, and equipment we already had: Animal Care, Commerce, Community, Food Prep, Gardening, Homesteading, Natural Medicine, Nest, Oddball, and Plumbing. That was very encouraging. We came up with some initial budgeting plans for acquiring what we would need for the other badges as needed.
Next we had to decide how much homeschool time we could allocate to PEP school, and what to replace. We decided to count PEP as our science, and compress social science and their electives to create three hours each school day for our homeschool PEP rally, or badge time, as we call it.
Now as parents, we were hesitantly sure we COULD at least attempt our version of PEP home school. But was this something the kids would be interested in enough to truly commit to? They were already fairly aware of what we were considering. Bethany had been using the Natural Medicine sand badge bits as suggestions as she was pursuing her personal interests in herbal medicine. And they were often in the room or vehicle as Rachel and I were reviewing and discussing the badge bits.
When we asked them if they wanted to do "normal" homeschool or try PEP homeschool, Bethany and John both were very interested to try out PEP. With our kids on board, we discussed how much PEP we intended to complete. Our intention was for John and Bethany to try to complete PEP 1 and PEP 2 in our school year, based on the suggested hours listed for achieving them. But we knew also that those times were for people who already knew how to do each skill, whereas many of them would have to be learned before they could be performed. So we were also very comfortable with it taking much longer than that.
Where would they begin? We told them that we wanted them to choose any of the areas where we had determined they could get the sand badge without needing any additional resources. Bethany decided to start with
Nest, and John decided to start with
Commerce.
Our SKIP/PEP Homeschool Adventure had begun!!!
Animal Care
Community
Dimensional Lumber Woodworking
Earthworks
Electricity
Food Prep and Preservation
Foraging
Gardening
Greywater and Willow Feeders
Homesteading
Metalworking
Natural Building
Natural Medicine
Oddball
Plumbing and Hot Water
Rocket
Round Wood Woodworking
Textiles
Tool Care
Woodland Care