Why I Created Sunshine & STEM
Every big dream starts somewhere small. Here's the heart behind Sunshine & STEM, and why I built it for families like yours.
Why I Created Sunshine & STEM
If you've landed on this website for the first time, here's the one thing I want you to understand before anything else: Sunshine & STEM wasn't built as a product. It was built from my own experience homeschooling my own kids, the curriculums I tried, the books that shaped how I think about learning, and everything I've come to love about doing this alongside my children.
Where it started
I love homeschooling. I love books, we have hundreds and hundreds of children's books at home, and the library is one of my favorite places to take my kids, probably one of our favorite things to do together. For a long time, that love showed up as a lot of homeschooling with no real structure behind it: random science activities here, random crafts there. Good moments, but scattered.
What actually pushed me to build Sunshine & STEM was wanting something more intentional, hands-on, but with purpose. I set out to build 52 weeks of curriculum specifically so that every single week, I had something concrete and meaningful to do with my own kids. I learned an enormous amount myself while preparing each week's content. I'd tried a few different existing curriculums along the way, but none of them quite fit what I actually loved doing with my children. So I built the one that did.
I made Sunshine & STEM for my own kids first. Everything in it, I do with them before I ever share it with anyone else.
What a week actually looks like
If you explore the site, you'll find weekly STEM adventures built around everything I personally love about learning: book and video recommendations (because when we do have TV time, I want it to actually be educational), hands-on STEM experiments, process art, which I could genuinely do every single day, and informational coloring pages, so that while you're watercoloring with your child, you can read a little bit about the topic together at the same time.
You'll also find my Science Millie books, which are story-based STEM adventures rather than dry, textbook-style science readers. Everything is designed to be lived with, not just completed once and set aside.
Where the philosophy comes from
I didn't design Sunshine & STEM by consciously pulling ideas from a stack of parenting philosophy books and assembling them into a curriculum. It came from how I've learned, and how my family homeschools best. I believe homeschooling really starts at birth, and everything I've read and tried since then has shaped how I do this today, heavily influenced by Montessori and Charlotte Mason, though I don't follow either one perfectly.
Montessori's emphasis on real understanding over rote memorization runs through a lot of what I build, especially in how I approach math, where the goal is always grasping the underlying concept, not just memorizing an answer. Charlotte Mason's belief in living books and rich, real reading shaped how much of Sunshine & STEM revolves around books rather than worksheets. I love learning, and I've always wanted to expose my own kids to as much of the world as I possibly can. Sunshine & STEM is really just that instinct, given some structure.
Why "Sunshine"
The name isn't incidental. Being outside is a huge part of how we live and learn, we're at parks constantly, and I try to take as much of our learning outdoors as I can. Sunshine & STEM is meant to be run outside, in nature, with friends and family, whenever possible. "Sunshine" reflects that as much as "STEM" reflects the hands-on science and discovery side of things.
At its heart, Sunshine & STEM is simply what I've built from raising and homeschooling my own children, made so that another parent doesn't have to start from scratch to give their own kids the same joyful, curious, hands-on learning I've been lucky enough to build with mine.
I hope you love it as much as I do. I am so glad you are here. Welcome!