Why Ree Drummond Homeschooled Her Kids

The Drummond ranch is a notoriously happy place — at least it seems so on TV. Luckily for The Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond's four kids, Alex, Paige, Todd, and Bryce, they didn't have to leave the ranch as youngsters to go to school, joining what is today a group of 3.7 million children grades K-12 that are homeschooled in America, per NHERI. In a 2007 post on her blog titled, "Yes. I'm a Homeschooling Freak of Nature," Drummond detailed why she decided to start homeschooling her children and how she got into it.

According to the blog post, Drummond and her husband, Ladd, began looking at the homeschooling option because of transportation issues after their oldest daughter, Alex, completed kindergarten. Because the Drummond ranch is so far from town, Alex would spend more than three hours every day on the school bus, an amount of time Drummond wasn't comfortable with. What she says also wouldn't have worked, however, would have been to load all four kids in the car and drive Alex to school and pick her up. "Something about me spending that amount of time in the car didn't exactly make my skirt fly up," Drummond wrote.

As the blog post continues, Ree Drummond discusses how she dove into the homeschooling pool along with her friend Hyacinth, with whom she researched curriculums and even put together play dates for their kids. Drummond notes the homeschooling lifestyle was perfect for their ranch lifestyle, allowing the children to help their father when needed, and giving them all more time together as a family. According to FoodFanatic, Drummond even sometimes incorporated her stellar cooking skills into a lesson, giving out s'mores as spelling bee prizes.

Fast forward to today, and Drummond's children seem to be succeeding academically and on the sports field. Paige recently graduated from the University of Arkansas (via Instagram) and brother Todd has announced his major decision to continue his high school football career at the University of South Dakota. In a recent Instagram post celebrating Drummond's nephew's graduation, Drummond got a bit nostalgic for those days all together back on the ranch, writing in jest, "I asked Bryce and Todd to promise me they will never pursue independence, higher education, or any of that nonsense that would one day take them away from their mother. The Pioneer Woman added, "They have not gotten back to me yet."