Wholeschoolers is a learning community that’s designed to help families bring meaningful, creative, and empowering experiences into their lives. Our long-term vision is to offer holistic online classes with a community component.
What do you mean by “holistic”?
For us, holistic means:
-Offering courses about play and creativity, life skills, nature connection, emotional processing, and other topics that aren’t centered in modern academia.
-Designing experiences that support children’s connection to their desires and boundaries. Learning is not forced, but is instead offered as empowering play.
-Recognizing that your children’s interests, relationships, physical environments, and educations are intimately interconnected. Wholeschoolers classes are designed to engage children’s natural passions and wisdom, involve the whole family, and nurture a creative responsiveness to their environment.
Who is Wholeschoolers for?
Wholeschoolers is for holistic homeschoolers, unschoolers, and other families who are looking for accessible ways to nurture their kids’ wholeness and aliveness. You don’t have to eat organic food, and you don’t have to be a full-time homeschooling family. Our content is designed to be flexibly helpful for people of all backgrounds, faiths, and income levels.
What are the classes like?
We are starting Wholeschoolers with beta classes. One of these classes, Play All Day, was designed for older kids to take independently online, with supplemental guides for parents. The second online class, Nature At Home, was designed for whole families to take together. Classes ran Mon-Fri, and consisted of daily 30-to-60-minute guided activities that participants could do whenever worked best for them. Each class also had an online social component, where parents and kids could share their discoveries and creations, chat, and support each other — culminating in a live online gathering on Saturdays.
Our next class will be an in-person whole-family course in Denver, Colorado, called Wholeschoolers Creating Habitat. We are in the process of choosing a location and timeline for that course.
How much does it cost?
We want Wholeschoolers to grow from everyone contributing resources whole-heartedly, including families in diverse financial situations. So payment for each class is pay-what-you-can. More concretely, we ask you to contribute an amount per class that reflects your desire for this kind of experience in your family. We trust your gut-based/prayer-based choice.
If you’re stumped, here are suggestions:
-If your family is always able to meet basic needs (food, housing, transport), consider contributing $50-150 per class.
-If your family is usually able to meet basic needs, consider contributing $10-50 per class.
-If your family is sometimes unable to meet basic needs, consider contributing $1-10 per class.
Payment covers all members of your family. For example, multiple siblings can take the kids-only classes without you paying more.
Once we launch the website in summer 2021, everything (a social network + growing class library) will be available by pay-what-you-can monthly subscription.
Who started Wholeschoolers?
We are Eryn and Heather Murphy, two homeschooled sisters who went on to become holistic children’s educators. Heather was the senior curriculum developer at Galileo Summer Camps, teaching creativity and innovation to hundreds of thousands of kids nationwide. Eryn teaches nature connection and mindfulness in Colorado, and is a former trauma counselor and classroom teacher.
We were excited to see more families homeschooling during the pandemic, because homeschooling helped us grow into healthy, creative, close-knit adult siblings. With Wholeschoolers, we hope to work with you all to create something great.
Beta Classes:
You can learn more about our first classes, Nature At Home and Play All Day, using this form. If you want to know about future classes or the website launch, send us your email.