A Year in Holistic Midwifery for Homeschoolers
A Full Year of Midwifery Study, at Your Kitchen Table
A thirty-six-week, self-directed course of study in holistic midwifery. With fourteen units, 140 self-check questions with complete answer keys, and twenty-five clinical skills worksheets. Built to pair with the midwifery textbook of your choosing.
Somewhere around fourteen or fifteen, a certain kind of girl decides she wants to be a midwife.
Usually it starts with a birth. Her mother’s, a sister’s, a neighbor’s. She was in the room, or just outside it, and something about what she saw settled in her and wouldn’t leave. She starts reading everything she can find. She asks questions at dinner that make her brothers get up from the table.
And then she runs into the wall.
Every real path into midwifery—apprenticeship, the CPM credential, nursing school—assumes she is at least eighteen. There is no on-ramp for a sixteen-year-old. So she waits. She reads books at random and forgets most of it. Three or four years pass, and when she finally becomes an apprentice, she starts from nothing.
That is a waste of the best learning years she will ever have.
What is A year in Midwifery?
A Year in Holistic Midwifery is a complete course of study that turns a midwifery textbook into an actual school year—112 pages of structure, self-testing, and hands-on skills work.
It is not a summary of a textbook and it will not replace one. It is the thing that makes a textbook usable: a sequence to follow, a list of what to look for in each section, terms to define, skills to practice, and questions that tell her honestly whether she understood what she read.
Every answer key is included. She grades her own work. You are not required to know anything about midwifery to hand her this book.
Use Digitally or Printed
This is a PDF printable resource that you can use on a tablet, phone, computer, or other device, OR you can print it out and have it bound yourself for a pen-and-paper version.
No hard copy will be mailed to you.
What’s inside?
Fourteen units across thirty-six weeks. Seven on pregnancy, seven on labor, birth, and the newborn. Two to three weeks each, sequenced the way midwifery is actually learned: philosophy and scope first, then anatomy, then physiology, then hands-on assessment, then what goes wrong and what to do about it.
140 self-check questions with complete answer keys. Each unit ends with ten questions in three kinds: recall and terminology, comprehension questions that ask her to explain why, and clinical reasoning scenarios that give her a situation and ask what she would think and do. Printed double-sided, each answer key lands on the back of its own questions.
Twenty-five clinical skills worksheets, including seven original anatomical diagrams drawn to be labeled from memory:
- The bony pelvis, anterior view — fifteen structures to label
- Pelvic planes and diameters in median section
- The four pelvic types, to identify and compare
- The fetal skull from above — sutures, fontanelles, and transverse diameters
- The fetal skull in profile — the four diameters and the attitudes that present them
- Fetal circulation, with the three shunts left blank
- The placenta, maternal and fetal surfaces
Plus practice sheets for Naegele’s rule (fourteen problems, including two requiring cycle adjustment), a fundal height plotting chart, Apgar scoring with five babies to score, and urine dipstick interpretation. Plus blank sequences she fills in and recites: Leopold’s maneuvers, the cardinal movements, shoulder dystocia, the four causes of postpartum hemorrhage, newborn resuscitation. Sixteen of the worksheets have answer keys.
Logs and forms to photocopy and reuse: blood pressure practice, pulse and respirations, contraction timing, comfort measures, postpartum fundal checks, and blank prenatal and labor chart entry forms.
A clinical skills checklist, a vocabulary log, a reading log, and a reading plan she fills in during week one to map the whole year against her own textbook.
The Fourteen Units
- Foundations: The Midwifery Model of Care
- Female Anatomy and Reproductive Physiology
- Conception, the Placenta, and Fetal Development
- Maternal Adaptations to Pregnancy
- Prenatal Skills: History, Examination, Palpation, and Fetal Heart Tones
- Nutrition and the Common Discomforts of Pregnancy
- Complications and Preexisting Conditions
- The Mechanics of Birth: Pelvis, Fetal Skull, Presentation, and Position
- The Physiology and Stages of Labor
- First Stage: Assessment, Support, and Comfort
- Second Stage and Birth
- Third Stage, the Placenta, and Immediate Postpartum
- Newborn Transition and Assessment
- Complications and Emergencies in Labor and Birth
What additional Resources Do You Need?
One comprehensive midwifery textbook. This guide supplies the structure; the reading comes from the book you choose.
Page three walks you through five common options and how each one maps onto the fourteen units, including what to watch for with each. Page four is a blank reading plan she fills in before week one—her own syllabus, in her own handwriting.
The textbooks range from around forty dollars to well over a hundred, so the choice is yours to make according to your budget and how deep you want the year to go. If you already own a midwifery text, you can almost certainly use it.
How it fits the homeschool Week
Six to eight hours a week, most of it independent.
Read. Twenty to thirty pages, slowly, with a pencil.
Define. Every term from the unit list, in her own words.
Draw. Redraw the diagrams by hand. Anatomy learned by hand stays learned.
Practice. The skills worksheet for that unit.
Write. A paragraph or two on the unit’s journal prompt.
Test. The self-check at the end of the unit, from memory, then turn the page.
Your involvement is up to you. Some mothers hand it over entirely and read the journal entries on Fridays. Some sit down with the anatomy worksheets and learn it alongside their daughter, which is its own kind of good year.
Who this is for
- The student who has already decided, and wants to start now rather than at eighteen
- The student who is curious and wants a serious year to find out whether this is really it
- A mother teaching herself alongside a daughter
- An adult beginning self-study before an apprenticeship
- Anyone who owns a midwifery textbook and has never made it past chapter four
Who this is not for
- Anyone looking for a credential. This is coursework, not certification, and it does not qualify anyone to attend a birth.
- Anyone wanting a light, pretty unit study. This is real academic work and the anatomy units are genuinely difficult.
- Anyone unwilling to buy a textbook. The guide does not work on its own, and I would rather tell you that here than after you’ve paid.
About Assigning Credit
Thirty-six weeks of reading, written work, and self-testing is a full-year course by any reasonable measure. Most families count it as a science credit—anatomy and physiology, with the worksheets serving as the lab component—or as a career and technical elective.
Homeschool record-keeping requirements vary quite a bit by state, so check yours. The reading plan page gives you a clean record of the textbook used and the material covered, which is usually what a transcript needs.
Why I Created this unit study
Having had my own babies at home and wishing I could become a midwife in a totally different time of life (aka, not right now), I knew midwifery would be on the heart of other young girls I knew too. Lo and behold, my niece decided she wanted to study midwifery in her last year of high school and she asked if she could borrow my midwifery books. So, I decided to take the knowledge that I knew, combined with modern teaching and research tools, and create this basic midwifery study unit to go along with the books for her. Midwifery books are absolutely massive, and there is almost no way to know where to begin. This is why I created this basic unit of study! One day, my own girls may decide they also want to be a midwife, and we will have this unit study readily available for them, too!
Questions People Ask
Do I need to know anything about midwifery to teach this?
No. Every answer key is included, and the guide is written to the student, not to the teacher. Your job is to hand her the book and read what she writes.
Is this appropriate for a high school student?
Yes. The material is clinical throughout — anatomy, physiology, assessment, and emergency response, written the way any medical textbook is written. It is the same content a nursing or midwifery student encounters, presented plainly and without sensationalism.
How old does she need to be?
It was built for high school. A motivated fourteen-year-old could manage it with a lighter textbook; the anatomy units are the limiting factor, not the subject matter.
What if she decides not to become a midwife?
She will still finish the year knowing more about how her own body works than most adults do, having read a professional textbook cover to cover, and having learned to study something hard without anyone standing over her. Very little of that is wasted.
Can I use it for more than one child?
Yes. It is a digital download and you may print it as many times as you need for your own family. Please don’t share the file outside your household.
Is this a Christian curriculum?
The clinical content is clinical — anatomy is anatomy. There is no Christian verbiage in the workbook, it is just a basic study for any belief. I will mention that the Anne Frye books begin with a dedication to the “wise women, practitioners, and witches”. While we don’t promote that lifestyle, the book itself is about midwifery, not new ageism. The mature Christian student will be able to gloss over these words without any issue.
What format is it?
A print-ready PDF, formatted for letter-size paper. Print the whole thing, or print unit by unit as you go. The logs and forms are meant to be photocopied.
Do I get updates?
This PDF will more than likely not need updates because it is about basic health and anatomy. If the PDF should be updated due to incorrect information, you will receive the free update.