How one homeschooling family turned the world into their classroom

Baltimore-based mom Tova Brody doesn’t send her kids to school. Their home is their school. And the world is their classroom

IT’S10 a.m. on a Tuesday and Tova Brody is sitting in the living room with her two oldest daughters giving them a homeschool writing lesson.

“Would this be an example of a metaphor?” asks Toby, age 13. She’s analyzing the lyrics to her favorite Jewish song — Moshe Yess’s “Dollar Bill” — and identifying all the elements of figurative language she can find in it.

“Yes! This is a perfect example!” Tova tells her daughter. “Do you see any others?”

Eleven-year-old Tillie is working on a “persuasive writing” assignment. “How do you spell ‘congressman’?” she asks. She’s writing a letter to her local congressman in Baltimore, Maryland, to campaign for a sidewalk on the Brodys’ street. They live on a main road, so they want sidewalks to make walking in the neighborhood safer. Tillie and her siblings have gone door to door with clipboards, asking their neighbors to sign a petition for more sidewalks, and they created an email blast campaign to their delegates, senators, and the Maryland Transportation Authority. So far, they’ve managed to get more sidewalks in their neighborhood, but there still isn’t one on their block. Tillie’s hoping to change that with her letter.

With the older girls engaged in their writing lesson, Tova can zoom her lens back to her baby, Shalva, who is on the floor pulling books off the shelf, and three-year-old Dov, who is happily eating a homemade zucchini muffin. (The Brody kids have a zucchini patch in their backyard, so zucchini muffins are a staple in this house.)

Downstairs, in the basement-turned-classroom, Tova’s nine-year-old Tippy and six-year-old Shifra are learning the 39 Melachos of Shabbos along with six other homeschooled girls who are part of the Baltimore Jewish community. One of the mothers in the Brody’s homeschooling co-op volunteers to teach the six- to nine-year-olds four days a week, while the other mothers take turns teaching different subjects. One mother holds a weekly book club, while another teaches a parshah art club. Other subjects on the agenda are yoga, dance, and drama.

“In our house, the world is the classroom,” Tova says, “and anything can be an educational opportunity. Baking bread teaches math and chemistry and burning a part of the dough teaches about the halachos of hafrashas challah. When my daughter, Toby, told me she loved a certain face cream, I said, ‘Why don’t you write a letter to the company to thank them and show hakaras hatov?’ The company wrote back and gave her a coupon for her next purchase. That was a lesson that was personally meaningful to her, an experience you can’t get out of a writing assignment from a textbook.”