Homeschool in the Woods

On the trails at Cascade Welcome Center in the fall, you can see tamaracks and sugar maples as their leaves turn bright gold. As you hike closer to Jubin’s Brook, you may see moose tracks in the mud and find beaver chews nearby. You could also hear laughing, splashing, and squeals of excitement. Upon further investigation, you may find a group of families and Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) naturalists looking for critters in the water, with nets and cups of water with dragonfly larvae, water striders, and tadpoles. These students and families are part of ADK’s new homeschool program.

Homeschool in the Woods is ADK’s newest youth program. It is a place-based, hands-on, and student-led program for homeschoolers ages 5 to 12 from all over the North Country and Adirondack Park. Many of the participating families are part of North Country Homeschooling, an informal group with over one thousand homeschooling families in northern New York.

According to Sunita Halasz, co-coordinator of North Country Homeschooling, “Members [of the group] come from Old Forge, Watertown, Potsdam, Malone, Plattsburgh, Schroon Lake, Glens Falls, the Tri-Lakes region, and everywhere in between.” Although these families are spread over a wide area and come from diverse backgrounds, Sunita says, “we all share the exact same desire to help our kids develop a lifelong love of learning, and this allows for automatic friendships as well as amazing social and learning opportunities for the students.”

ADK first connected with this community in 2020, while schools were doing remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ADK educators adapted the curriculum from Three Seasons at Heart Lake, ADK’s fourth-grade school outreach program, into a virtual program to continue engaging students with the outdoors while everyone was out of the classroom and sticking closer to home. With the help of Sunita, ADK was able to share this modified program—dubbed “Bringing Heart Lake to Your Backyard”—with the families involved in North Country Homeschooling, as well. Over thirty homeschool families have incorporated this program into their at-home learning.

ADK’s education team realized, however, there was still a large homeschool community in our area that we were not reaching with our youth outreach and began exploring ways to support them. In May 2023, ADK ran its first-ever homeschool-specific program. Since that first day, ADK has run two three-week Homeschool in the Woods sessions and is gearing up for a third expanded session this fall. Each session has a theme that ties the classes together and introduces topics often taught in the classroom through inquiry and experiential learning. The program strives to deepen students’ connection to the Adirondack Park, each other, and the outdoors while supporting New York State Department of Education curriculum.

“Rural northern New York—with our snow, and playing outside in bug season, and stacking wood, and swimming in chilly lakes—gives our geographically widespread group a common identity and an instant fellowship,” says Sunita. “We all live in small communities where you have to put effort into making great learning opportunities happen. But once you understand the power of the ‘homeschool passport,’ as I like to call it, which is when you reach out to a local expert or business in the community and ask them to provide a learning opportunity and everyone responds ‘Yes, bring the kids!,’ you realize that we actually live in a very rich area for learning.”

ADK’s program, and others like it, are beneficial to homeschool families because they give students the opportunity to get to know each other and grow a learning community over several classes. While there are many opportunities to use the “homeschool passport,” and several organizations offer individual Homeschool Days, not many places provide continuous programming that builds on itself for this audience.

According to Sunita, “ADK’s Homeschool in the Woods program, in particular, develops an ongoing relationship with the students and their families through the different seasons, and it is helpful for providing hands-on experiences the families might not otherwise be able to coordinate on their own. It is a top priority for homeschooling families that our children have a healthy sense of self, family, community, and connectedness with the landscape in which they are growing up, and the Homeschool in the Woods program definitely helps fill this need.”

During a Homeschool in the Woods class, families can expect to spend most of, if not the entire, class time of three hours outside exploring and learning about nature. Each class includes games to strengthen observation skills; chances to work on projects with other students; plenty of exploration time; snack and story time; and, of course, lots of hiking. Over the six classes, ADK naturalists have the privilege of watching students become more confident being outdoors and with each other. We get to watch new friendships blossom and strengthen and are exceptionally proud of how much the students grow throughout the session.

When asked for feedback, parents shared their appreciation for this program, as well. One wrote, “My daughters absolutely loved the program—so much that they say it’s their favorite activity and ask all the time when they get to go again. They were SO excited there is going to be a winter session! Keep the sessions coming.”

Another said, “Eliza and helpers did a great job engaging kids and getting on their level. Kids were interacting and asking questions and participating well. These classes were very worthwhile, with great standalone topics, regardless of what we are doing at home.”

To accommodate the popularity of this program, ADK is expanding Homeschool in the Woods to six classes per session and doubling the program size from twelve to twenty-four spots. In this fall’s program, students will explore how organisms in Adirondack ecosystems are connected and follow how energy moves through a food web. We hope to continue to grow this program to support even more North Country homeschool families and age groups in the future.

For this fall, ADK is able to keep the cost of this program at $25 per student for the whole session. With your support, we can continue to meet the needs of this diverse and dynamic community.

If you are interested in participating or willing to support Homeschool in the Woods through a donation, please contact Karim Becker by emailing karim [at] adk.org.

This article was written by Eliza Phillips, ADK’s outreach coordinator, and ran in the Fall 2024 issue of Adirondac magazine. Before coming to ADK, one of Eliza’s roles was homeschool coordinator for an inner-city nature center. She is passionate about sharing experiences in nature with people of all ages, and especially with the homeschool community.