Parents concerned about traditional education often face a difficult choice: accept the standard school system or take on the daunting task of homeschooling alone. But what if there was a third option that combined flexibility with community support?

Cassie Tinsmon, founder of Lily Lake Homeschool Collective in Kansas, is creating exactly that—a space where children can learn through play, exploration, and community while parents maintain the freedom to design their family life on their own terms.

In this conversation with OpenEd's Ela Richmond, Cassie shares her journey into unschooling, why she believes learning shouldn't be separated from daily life, and how she's building a new model of education that serves both children and parents.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction and Background - Cassie's Journey into Homeschooling
• 04:10 The Birth and Evolution of Lily Lake Homeschool Collective
• 07:47 Daily Life and Learning Approaches at Lily Lake
• 15:31 Natural Integration of Learning into Everyday Activities
• 24:59 Success Stories and Community Building
• 32:17 Current Developments and Future Vision

Links

• Lily Lake Homeschool Collective
• Let Grow Play Club
• Peter Gray – Freedom to Learn Blog
• Phillips Fundamental Learning Center
• Wow in the World Podcast

Transcript

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you explain your approach to education and how long you've had this approach?

I've known since I was a teenager that we were always going to homeschool. I have a sister who has eight children and has homeschooled them all. My oldest niece is now in her early 30s, so I've been around it for a long time. My daughter is 11 and my son is four.

My sister was also very "unschooly." I've watched her kids grow up that way, and it always just made sense to me that kids naturally will learn when you give them the opportunity. I'm really trying to preserve that internal motivation to learn that kids are born with. We all see it when our kids are infants and toddlers—on average, they learn to talk, learn to walk, start automatically hearing sounds and identifying letters without us sitting them down in a class.

The unschooling, self-directed idea is based on that. As long as you continue to expose your child to new things and give them opportunities to participate and learn, they will thrive and learn what they need to know.

How do you maintain their love of learning so they become active participants in their lives?

A lot of it is demonstrating it. My husband and I both enjoy reading, listening to podcasts, learning new things. Obviously starting this business—we have no idea what we're doing! We talk a lot about living your life, questioning things, and always being curious.

We of course have battles about screen time and those things. We live in a society where attention is continually being pulled in all sorts of directions, so you're fighting against video games and movies.

When my daughter got to kindergarten age, all of our friends that we had made as toddlers ended up going to school. This was kind of the impetus for Lily Lake—it didn't look like I thought homeschooling would look like. I thought she would be super curious and want to sit down with me and learn things and go to museums, but it just didn't work like that.

During COVID, there was a lot of "okay, what does this look like?" Then I started a co-op a couple of years ago, offering a free class every other Friday at our local library for homeschool people. I watched how her curiosity changed when other kids were around. She engaged a lot more. That turned into a co-op running a couple of days a week, and eventually became Lily Lake.

What are your primary goals when it comes to educating your kids and helping them grow?

One of our largest priorities is raising them to be good people and civically engaged. Being kind and helping others is the most important thing.

Critical thinking is also crucial. We live in a world where it's really hard to decipher what's true. The traditional ways of trusting a peer-reviewed article or looking something up in a journal—it's all just been so convoluted in the last five years. You really have to dig deep and read things with different views, then figure it out for yourself.

I want them to be confident in making their own decisions and living a life that feels right for them. It may not be about going to college and making a lot of money—it could be raising kids. I was part of a generation of women where it was expected you'd go to college and have a career while raising kids. I think balancing all of that will look different for my daughter's generation.

What skills have you seen developing in your kids that you're proud of?

One of the coolest things with my daughter over the last six months since we opened Lily Lake is that we also have a toddler play cafe in a second building, and she has learned how to basically run the cafe herself. She can use a commercial espresso machine and make lattes. She knows how to run the point-of-sale system and can make every menu item and serve orders.

She works the birthday parties with my husband every weekend, which has allowed her to make some money. We've now opened her a bank account and are talking about those sorts of things. We've had one of her friends who was jealous come work a birthday party with her too. I didn't really think about that when we opened the two businesses side by side, but it's been really cool to see the kids engage with that side of the business.

What does a day in the life look like for your daughter?

Since we opened Lily Lake, we're there Monday through Friday. We get out there around 9:30 or 10, which is when our first "spark session" starts. We usually have kids here from about 9:30 until 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon. Some days we have 10 or 12 kids, some days just four.

They usually do an hour and a half to two-hour activity, lesson, or art project. Then we leave about an hour for lunch. We have a big open kitchen in the basement with a bar facing the kitchen that has 10 stools. They usually sit up there—frankly, they sit on the counter—and make their own lunches together. They often end up baking, making pizza, or working with sourdough starters.

After lunch, they play outside for a bit—it's just really a lot of free time—then we try to round them back up for another learning activity. This week the theme was basketball and March Madness. They did a project creating logos for their basketball teams, designing t-shirts, and a poetry bracket situation.

It's very hands-on. Through that weekly theme, you get the language arts, math, and core subjects, but it's not like, "Okay, sit down and do your math and learn fractions."

Why did most families come to you? What challenges are they having?

A lot of the reason we did this is because we both worked, and I ended up working more after my son was born than we had ever intended. There weren't a lot of options—especially pre-COVID, micro schools and hybrid schools didn't exist.

We were looking for a program that could help parents find a place for their kids to go during the day. Whether it's working or caring for aging parents, parents often have something else they're doing besides homeschooling. There are lots of places that offer an hour class once a week, but nothing more substantial.

So we designed it as more of a maker space, community space where families can drop in and stay all day if it works for them. Younger ones might come for just a two-hour session four days a week because of shorter attention spans or afternoon naps. Many parents stay on site sometimes—some sit in the coffee shop next door and work, then come out to have lunch with their kid.

That's the vibe I wanted—a community where parents are welcome when they can be here, and they can just walk away knowing their kids are having a good time when they can't. Maximizing that flexibility was really a big thing for us.

You mentioned your daughter wasn't approaching learning the way you expected. How did you figure out the best approach for her?

I'm honestly not sure I have! We're still working on it. I think everybody goes into homeschooling with certain expectations. I had in my head how it would work based on what I thought I'd seen with my sister's family.

My daughter and I, she's very smart, but we've butted heads. She's just not going to sit down with me and do an activity. And frankly, I don't have a lot of energy for planning an activity for one child. We ended up having a huge gap between our kids, so she was an only child until she was seven. It was a struggle to do a whole lesson plan for one kid who may or may not engage with it.

Reading was a bit of a struggle. I just expected her to read, but she expressed no interest, didn't want to try. We backed off for a couple of years because I'm one of those who would rather her read at 14 and love reading than push her when she's not ready. Eventually, we got her in with a reading tutor, and it only took a few months of somebody who's not us working one-on-one with her to get her reading.

She still doesn't love reading physical books like I wish she would, but she listens to podcasts and books all the time. She was listening to "Wow in the World," a science podcast, when she was three or four. She got into ancient Egypt for a while and Harry Potter more recently. In my ideal world, she would sit down with a physical book, but at least she's getting the information one way and knows so much.

It seems like she brings learning into every aspect of her life.

I think there's really just no division in our life. We plan on running the program through the summer too, because my work doesn't stop for the summer. It's just really interesting that our society is so set up around the school year.

We do it all together as a family. She's a part of all of it—renovating this building, sitting in when we went to the attorney's office, how to incorporate, how to get the business paperwork set up, how to get the loans. We just walked her through all of those processes. Whether she remembers it in 20 years if she wants to start her own business, I doubt it, but it goes somewhere in your brain. We really don't do learning and life as two separate things. It's just all together.

Have you encountered any challenges with your son yet? Many homeschooling parents find it difficult because there's no teacher to outsource to—you're doing it yourself.

He's four and a half, so he just knows his letters and sounds by picking them up. We don't sit him down and do anything. Through being a They Live Network founder, we got a phonics curriculum from Phillips Fundamental Learning Center, which is a school here in town that does a lot with dyslexia and dysgraphia. I took their training because I saw that need in the homeschool community.

That was probably the most intimidating thing for me—I don't know how to teach reading. I don't remember what a long A versus a short vowel is. Even during the training, I was the only non-teacher there, and I did not remember any of this terminology from school.

But I really want to empower parents. I think our society often takes away parents' confidence in their ability to parent. You can do this. We've done this forever. Whether or not you have a college degree or even a high school diploma, the information is available to all of us. You know your child better than anybody else. Take the initiative and be confident.

Many homeschool moms fear they're not enough to teach their kids. What would you say to that?

It makes me sad because when you walk home with a newborn, you're expected to know what to do. But then all of a sudden, they get to kindergarten at five, and you're supposed to hand them over to somebody else for eight hours a day. That's bizarre to me.

This idea that we need books or experts to tell us how to parent—it's like so many things in our society now. There's coaching for careers, organizing, everything. There are so many people looking for external guidance when I think we don't give ourselves enough credit for figuring things out on our own.

It's all about how society takes that place, whether it's nonprofits or government, and not about how we support families to raise kids the way they want to and feel is best.

Are you ever afraid of messing your kids up? With traditional school, if your kid has issues, others share the responsibility. But as a homeschool parent, everyone looks at you.

I am a little nervous, but no more than I would be if I sent them to school. There are plenty of people who go through public or private schools who turn out "terrible" or struggle in life—it happens to everybody.

Watching my own kids, it's fascinating how much of their personality is ingrained from birth. My husband and I have been very lucky—we've worked hard, but we have family support, education, and flexible schedules. All those things help a family raise a kid to adulthood.

I keep reminding myself of the alternative, and I just don't have that much faith in it. Honestly, from what I've seen with my kids so far, they probably would go to public school and be fine. I went to public school, as did my siblings, and we all turned out to be successful. But my cousins were actually homeschooled in the 70s, so I've literally been around it all my life.

You've been around homeschooling your whole life—why did it appeal to you so much?

It just really made sense. I didn't particularly like school. I easily found it "gameable"—I just did what I needed to do to get the grade, even through college and graduate programs. It was just checking boxes, never about genuine interest. I've still never used any of my degrees in an actual job.

As society has become more divisive, I'm unsure of the messaging my child would get in school. I want them to think critically, whether they end up believing what I believe or not. I want them to feel confident making those decisions about politics, religion, and other matters.

Then there's the bullying, violence, and the fact that kids now have to do mass shooting drills. I think people feel that in their soul, and it's not a healthy way to be. Walking through metal detectors, having locked doors all the time—that's just an insane thing to be doing with our kids.

What did you love about your sister's approach to homeschooling?

One thing that has really helped me is seeing her children from birth to now—four of them are out of the house. One ended up with a master's from Johns Hopkins, one's in the military, one joined the Carpenter's Union, and one's managing a Chipotle. They've all chosen very different paths.

It felt questionable at times, like when they were in high school, but I've seen them go from being teenagers who never leave their room to growing into adults who are all successful and seemingly happy in their chosen careers. It's not just this idea that you go to high school, go to college, check the boxes.

A lot of it's just time with your kids. They're only young so long, and to think of them being gone eight hours a day, plus extracurriculars—you only get an hour or two with them. We're slowing life down, setting our own schedule, and focusing on quality time together.

They had really open relationships, which I thought was cool. Their friends were there, she was friends with their parents, and now that my niece is 30, her childhood friend has children the same age as my son. That community aspect from very young to old—they share all those experiences of parents dying, tragedies, celebrations, births. It's a really tight-knit group of people, not just seeing your kids' friends at sporting events.

What resources would you recommend to other homeschooling parents?

More than anything, finding a community of people who are prioritizing the things you're prioritizing and having that support network. That's why I started my own. There are lots of Facebook groups, but one of the things we emphasize here is the in-person connection—show up, be here. We learned from COVID how much we need that in-person connection.

We're also trying to facilitate community building through our toddler play cafe. We have a lot of people with one, two, three-year-olds asking about the homeschool space and what we offer for younger kids. One of our goals is to let them see how homeschooling looks for all our different families with school-age children so they can start building relationships and community at very young ages.

What trend do you see in the homeschool or alternative education movement?

I think the hybrid models are really cool because they give families flexibility and control while still providing support. And just seeing many people who never would have considered it opting out of traditional education is exciting.

What are you excited about in the coming year at Lily Lake?

Now that it's spring, we're seeing more use of our two acres. We're just getting ready to submit a grant for a nature Montessori-type play space. We got a cat, and we're looking at getting some goats and other farm animals. A lot of people are looking for farm schools or nature-based schools, so we're really expanding on that outdoor area.

We're also reevaluating our model based on the first four months. We originally planned to be open 9-5 to support working parents, but we don't ever have people stay past 3, so that's interesting. We're looking at maybe adding open play time—I've been learning about the Let Grow Play Club from Peter Gray, where we open our space to let kids play relatively unsupervised, giving them freedom to play uninterrupted.

Yesterday was a great day—we had a bunch of new people, the weather was beautiful, kids were inside and outside, parents were meeting each other. We had one of the Play Cafe parents giving another parent a tour of the homeschool space. It just warms my heart to see when all of these families connect because people are craving it, and raising kids is so hard.

That's where my passion is—providing support to families and building a community that's not just what we're providing to them, but them building what they want to see in a space for everybody.

Lily Lake Homeschool Collective is located about 10 minutes outside Wichita, Kansas. You can find them at lilylakekansas.com or on Facebook and Instagram.

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