Friday Feature: Happy Hens Farm and Forest School
Maggie Van Camp’s son started her on her homeschooling journey. Since Maggie was a kindergarten teacher, he didn’t understand why he was in a different kindergarten class. “He started telling all of our family that he’s going to be homeschooled for first grade. He’s not going to school,” Maggie recalls. At first, she and her husband were taken aback, not even sure where he’d heard about homeschooling. They decided to try it for a year.
“It was a great experience. He thrived academically, socially. He just really needed that extra time with his mom,” she says. “So we decided to do that with all of our kids.”
Even before her son’s announcement, Maggie had been having some doubts about the public school environment. “I just felt like, wow, all this stuff’s so arbitrary. I can’t do what I know is in the best interest of these kids,” she says. She thought they should be running around outside, moving their bodies, singing, talking, and thinking—not walking silently in the hall or repetitively reciting the alphabet.
Maggie switched gears. She got her PhD, taught as an adjunct, and then ran the early childhood education department at a community college. When her family moved to New Hampshire in 2021, she spent a few years doing grant-funded research on play as a scientific intervention in public schools. She loved the research, writing, and conferences, but it was a lot. “I thought, this is great, but I’m traveling all the time, and I really want to spend more time with my kids,” she remembers, realizing they wouldn’t be little forever.
She got involved with a group that was opening a charter school. “But I kind of hit the same wall with the arbitrariness of public education, meetings with the state, and lots of reports,” says Maggie. She saw there wasn’t as much flexibility as she expected. “You’re still a public school. You can do some things that are innovative, but not that much. So I just felt called to like step away from that.”
“Let’s pivot,” Maggie told her husband. She opened Maggie’s Happy Hens Farm and Forest School as a home-based daycare and intended to continue homeschooling as usual. But her kids had other ideas—they wanted her to start a school. The family made a list of everything they wanted to do. For Maggie and her husband, reading and writing well was high on the list. The kids picked things such as rock climbing, BB guns, and archery.
Happy Hens Farm and Forest School operates out of the family’s large home on 11 acres. Maggie’s husband built a yurt, and last fall, she welcomed kids up to age 12 to the “Yurt School,” as it’s been dubbed. She posted about it on local homeschool groups and partnered with KaiPod Catalyst. “I thought maybe we’d get five or six kids, but we have 28 kids enrolled in our first year,” she says happily. “It’s been really way more successful than I could have ever anticipated.”
The daycare, which has 15 kids enrolled and eight attending most days, uses one living room in her house. They converted another room into a maker space with a Cricut machine, 3D printer, sewing machines, cardboard cutters, masking tape, and other supplies.
For next year, she’s opening Happy Hens up to age 14, but she’s stopping there after seeing her older son’s experiences. “For homeschoolers, there’s part-time jobs, there’s internships, there’s all these different interesting, flexible ways that they can pursue education through high school that are so unique and different than what a traditional high school would be,” she says.
If enrollment doubles for next year, they’ll build a second yurt. “The idea initially was that we were going to build three yurts. They’d kind of be in a triangle so we could have the different grade levels kind of in their own little cozy yurt. So we’ll see how that progresses,” she explains. “I think the max would be three, so 60 kids would be the absolute max.”
Since the microschool students are all registered homeschoolers, they can come two, three, or five days a week. Most use the state’s education freedom accounts (EFAs), which cover two-day tuition completely. Families choosing more days pay out of pocket for the difference. Without EFA, she says, many of her families would not be able to attend. “The area that I live isn’t super high income,” she notes.
For the microschool, kids meet at 9:00 a.m. and play outside while waiting for everyone to arrive. Then they break into small groups for academics. The other teacher takes one group to the yurt, while Maggie takes a group to the birch room, which is the indoor classroom. Parents choose what curriculum the kids use for English language arts and math, and the teachers work with them individually or in groups of two or three to complete the work.
While two groups work on academics, another group usually stays outside for more activities. “We have a big tree swing, we’ve got ninja slacklines, all sorts of interesting tree tents and stuff up for them to explore,” says Maggie. They rotate so each group gets academic and play time. Then comes lunch. “They’re usually all starving by 11,” she adds.
After lunch, they head back outside for unstructured free play. The kids create their own unique games, which Maggie loves to see. Making swords and shields out of cardboard and tape is very popular and has helped them learn about respecting boundaries and not hurting others. “I think violently themed play, especially with boys, is developmentally really important,” she says. “There isn’t really a space for that in public education, and even in some parenting styles, that would be discouraged. But I actually think it’s really helpful for them to understand. You know, they’re kind of dealing with concepts of power, like good guys, bad guys, who’s strong, who can save people. There’s all these interesting undercurrents going on in this type of play. So we aren’t opposed to that, and we let them do play fighting.”
Maggie brings in experts to teach various topics in the afternoons. “We had a survivalist class in the fall where they learned shelter building,” she says. “In the spring, we have an expert woodworker who’s coming in, and the kids are going to learn how to use all these different tools.” They’ve also done archery, BB guns, printmaking, and soapmaking. They even visit a nearby ski mountain for skiing lessons.
“The culture of New Hampshire and where we live is like lots of kids do adventurous things, and that’s considered normal here. But in schools, you can’t talk about guns or Nerf guns,” she points out. As a microschool, she doesn’t face the same restrictions. She can let the kids learn and be adventurous while teaching them boundaries, appropriate behavior, and how to self-regulate. She finds giving kids more freedom and flexibility helps avoid many of the negative behaviors seen in public schools because they aren’t so bogged down by meaningless rules.
Not surprising, given the name of the microschool, the kids also spend a lot of time with animals. “I really love chickens. So I have like 50 chickens outside, and we have dairy goats, honeybees, all the homesteading kind of self-sufficiency stuff going on,” she says. Animals were more of a focus in the fall, and the kids learned how they take care of them and the garden. The animals are mostly “cozied up in their coops and their barns” for winter, but the farm will be active again as spring arrives.
Like most of the founders I talk to, Maggie urges others—parents and teachers—to go for it. “If you feel it, in your heart, ‘I don’t want to send my kid to that school,’ go looking for something else. And if you can’t find it, build it yourself. Because if you’re feeling that way, it’s so likely that other families are struggling with the same things, but they don’t know what to do,” she says. “Get organized, get out there, start talking to people. It really is the situation of build it, and they will come.”