A different kind of curriculum—built around books, curiosity, nature, meaningful work, and learning together.
What if learning didn't have to be divided into subjects, squeezed into worksheets, or confined to a school day?
The Harvest is a month-long family learning experience designed to bring learning back into everyday life. Throughout September, your family will explore food, abundance, and our relationship with the living world through beautiful books, time outdoors, hands-on experiments, cooking, growing, conversation, history, science, math, and plenty of room to follow your own curiosity.
Rather than giving every child a separate curriculum, the whole family explores one theme together. Younger children can listen, wander, cook, dig, draw, and wonder. Older children and teens can take the same ideas deeper through research, experimentation, history, and bigger questions. Parents aren't left on the sidelines, either. You'll have your own book to read and ideas to consider because our children's education doesn't have to mean the end of our own.
There are no daily schedules to follow and no pressure to complete everything. Read the books. Choose the experiences that interest your family. Skip what doesn't. Spend an entire afternoon following an unexpected rabbit hole.
Curiosity is allowed to change the plan.
This month begins with something tiny: a seed.
From there, we'll follow food from the earth to our tables, discover the hidden world beneath our feet, grow and tend something living, explore decomposition and composting, learn how people preserved a harvest for winter, cook together, and consider how gratitude might change the way we participate in the world around us.
September ends around the Harvest Table, where families are invited to gather, share what they have, and reflect on a month spent learning together.
For Adults & Teens
Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer
Adults and teens are invited to read independently throughout the month. Print, ebook, and audiobook all work. This isn't only about educating our children. We get to keep learning, too.
Family Read-Aloud
Farmer Boy — Laura Ingalls Wilder
A longer story to share throughout the month simply for the pleasure of reading together.
Books to Share
Four picture books accompany the month's weekly explorations. These aren't only for little kids—beautiful picture books give the entire family common stories, ideas, and conversations to share. Younger children may especially enjoy returning to them again and again.
Books are not included with your guide and can be purchased, borrowed from your library, or enjoyed as audiobooks when available.
Throughout the month, your family will:
• Wake up a seed and observe germination
• Plant and tend something living
• Create a September seed collection
• Trace an ordinary meal around the world
• Discover what's being harvested where you live
• Bake an apple pie and begin a family recipe book
• Explore the living world hidden beneath the soil
• Turn food waste into future soil through decomposition and composting
• Plan a winter pantry and ask: Could we survive the winter?
• Preserve something from the harvest
• Practice reciprocity by finding a small way to give back
• Gather around your own Harvest Table
You'll also begin The Same Place, a year-long family practice of returning to one familiar outdoor place each month and watching an entire year unfold.
You won't find isolated blocks labeled "Now we're doing science" or "It's time for math."
Instead, those subjects appear because they're useful.
Measure ingredients while baking a pie. Calculate how much food a family would need to survive winter. Explore botany while germinating a seed. Encounter microbiology in a handful of soil. Follow geography across the journey of your dinner. Discover history through agriculture, preservation, and Farmer Boy. Write because you've found something worth remembering.
The experience comes first. The learning follows naturally.
You do not need a farm, garden, homeschool room, or elaborate collection of supplies.
You can live in an apartment or on acreage. Your children can be different ages. You can homeschool, unschool, attend traditional school, or simply be a family that wants to learn more together.
Use this guide loosely.
Do three things one week and one thing the next. Listen to the read-aloud in the car. Spend three days obsessed with something that wasn't in the guide at all. Skip an activity because everyone would rather go outside.
This curriculum is here to support your family's curiosity—not manage it.
Your downloadable September guide includes four weeks of family explorations, book discussions, hands-on activities, nature experiences, recipes, optional extensions for older children and teens, family reflection, and printable pages to keep and use.
You'll also begin two traditions that can grow throughout the year: The Same Place, a record of the natural world changing around you, and Our Family Recipe Book, a collection of food your family has made and memories you've made around it.
Print the pages you want, keep the guide digitally, or use a combination of both.
Welcome to September. Welcome to The Harvest.
A different kind of curriculum—built around books, curiosity, nature, meaningful work, and learning together.
What if learning didn't have to be divided into subjects, squeezed into worksheets, or confined to a school day?
The Harvest is a month-long family learning experience designed to bring learning back into everyday life. Throughout September, your family will explore food, abundance, and our relationship with the living world through beautiful books, time outdoors, hands-on experiments, cooking, growing, conversation, history, science, math, and plenty of room to follow your own curiosity.
Rather than giving every child a separate curriculum, the whole family explores one theme together. Younger children can listen, wander, cook, dig, draw, and wonder. Older children and teens can take the same ideas deeper through research, experimentation, history, and bigger questions. Parents aren't left on the sidelines, either. You'll have your own book to read and ideas to consider because our children's education doesn't have to mean the end of our own.
There are no daily schedules to follow and no pressure to complete everything. Read the books. Choose the experiences that interest your family. Skip what doesn't. Spend an entire afternoon following an unexpected rabbit hole.
Curiosity is allowed to change the plan.
This month begins with something tiny: a seed.
From there, we'll follow food from the earth to our tables, discover the hidden world beneath our feet, grow and tend something living, explore decomposition and composting, learn how people preserved a harvest for winter, cook together, and consider how gratitude might change the way we participate in the world around us.
September ends around the Harvest Table, where families are invited to gather, share what they have, and reflect on a month spent learning together.
For Adults & Teens
Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer
Adults and teens are invited to read independently throughout the month. Print, ebook, and audiobook all work. This isn't only about educating our children. We get to keep learning, too.
Family Read-Aloud
Farmer Boy — Laura Ingalls Wilder
A longer story to share throughout the month simply for the pleasure of reading together.
Books to Share
Four picture books accompany the month's weekly explorations. These aren't only for little kids—beautiful picture books give the entire family common stories, ideas, and conversations to share. Younger children may especially enjoy returning to them again and again.
Books are not included with your guide and can be purchased, borrowed from your library, or enjoyed as audiobooks when available.
Throughout the month, your family will:
• Wake up a seed and observe germination
• Plant and tend something living
• Create a September seed collection
• Trace an ordinary meal around the world
• Discover what's being harvested where you live
• Bake an apple pie and begin a family recipe book
• Explore the living world hidden beneath the soil
• Turn food waste into future soil through decomposition and composting
• Plan a winter pantry and ask: Could we survive the winter?
• Preserve something from the harvest
• Practice reciprocity by finding a small way to give back
• Gather around your own Harvest Table
You'll also begin The Same Place, a year-long family practice of returning to one familiar outdoor place each month and watching an entire year unfold.
You won't find isolated blocks labeled "Now we're doing science" or "It's time for math."
Instead, those subjects appear because they're useful.
Measure ingredients while baking a pie. Calculate how much food a family would need to survive winter. Explore botany while germinating a seed. Encounter microbiology in a handful of soil. Follow geography across the journey of your dinner. Discover history through agriculture, preservation, and Farmer Boy. Write because you've found something worth remembering.
The experience comes first. The learning follows naturally.
You do not need a farm, garden, homeschool room, or elaborate collection of supplies.
You can live in an apartment or on acreage. Your children can be different ages. You can homeschool, unschool, attend traditional school, or simply be a family that wants to learn more together.
Use this guide loosely.
Do three things one week and one thing the next. Listen to the read-aloud in the car. Spend three days obsessed with something that wasn't in the guide at all. Skip an activity because everyone would rather go outside.
This curriculum is here to support your family's curiosity—not manage it.
Your downloadable September guide includes four weeks of family explorations, book discussions, hands-on activities, nature experiences, recipes, optional extensions for older children and teens, family reflection, and printable pages to keep and use.
You'll also begin two traditions that can grow throughout the year: The Same Place, a record of the natural world changing around you, and Our Family Recipe Book, a collection of food your family has made and memories you've made around it.
Print the pages you want, keep the guide digitally, or use a combination of both.
Welcome to September. Welcome to The Harvest.
