A Valuable Tool for Language Arts, Retention, Reading and Comprehension in our Homeschooling Toolbox As you know, I’m not a Charlotte Mason or Waldorf purest, but pull from both pedagogies…

Our Process of Soap Making and How it Can Be Used for a Chemistry Lesson I’ve been making soap for a number of years for our family and to give…

The weather has started to cool off here bringing with it fires, sweaters, and hot mugs of tea. Tea is a wonderful part of our winter homeschooling. Making them such…

A Simple Hand Sewing Project for your Homeschool Read Alouds or Lessons Handcrafts have been a large part of our homeschooling. Not only do handcrafts provide fine motor skills used…

My Favorite Way to Play with Grammar and Language in our Homeschooling I just want to say that I am silly-excited about making this game for you. I hope that if you don’t play with anything else I send you, you will play with this. I started this game with my daughter early on in…

A Tool of Analysis to Help Us Process and Understand a Time Period in History If you’ve been following me for a while, you might be aware the most challenging subject in school for myself with history. I simply did not learn the way that they taught it. Learning to teach this subject in a…

Handcrafts are a wonderful way to express creativity, develop fine motor skills, and increase the capacity for active listening during lessons. There’s also a little pride and excitement in making something yourself. This week we are doing a little weaving project. We are going to weave on a homemade cardboard loom. No loom to purchase;…

Bringing a Little of the Outside Inside for Science Today we are going outside to bring some of nature inside. This week we’re chatting about several observational activities that can make science fun. I’m giving 4 examples here: butterflies, tadpoles, moths, and mushrooms. However, there are so many others you could do a as well.…

My Process when Composing a Waldorf-style History Block – hint, we use a lot of Charlotte Mason tools. I knew from the beginning that I wanted the experience of learning history to be different than that of my own. However, as we delved deeper into history, I could see aspects of my history staring back…

Various Tools We Can Use to Bring Meaning to our History Studies I knew something was missing in our history studies, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Growing up, history had always been my least favorite subject, but now it’s one of my favorites. It all has to do with how history was taught.…

Little Actions that Carry us in Connection in our Homeschooling “I want my homeschooling to feel like yours looks.” This was a comment that I received when I had posted a picture of us homeschooling. What most people don’t understand about homeschooling is that it truly different than school. There are many whose style of…

And an inside Look into my Previous Planners I’ve just finished my planning pages for 2026-27 school year, and printed out the ones that I need for my planner. This years are similar to the ones from last year. No meaningful changes with the exception that I’ve made a sheet of “stickers” of graphics that…

What we’ve used and what it looked like for us over the years When I talked about finding your baseline in Thinking about Time in your Homeschool, one of our priorities is foreign language. That’s just our personal family. It’s not like one of the three r’s (Reading, Writing, and Math,) but it is something…

Where Everything that You Work on in your Homeschooling Comes Together I’ve heard a lot of people describe main lesson page as a child making their own textbook. However, I don’t think that that does main lesson pages or notebook Ing justice. It really is so much more than that. Main lesson pages are a…

Supplies that Have Lasted throughout our CM and Waldorf Inspired Homeschool Years Through the years, we have used a wide variety of different supplies and products. Today I’m going to share with you the ones that we’ve used the most and have lasted us the longest. These are mostly quality products that are well worth…

Our Journey from Early Elementary through High School and into Essay Work I cannot believe that we’ve gotten this far along in our journey together, and we haven’t talked about narration. We need to rectify that. Let’s chat about narration. Narration is an invaluable tool for ‘teaching’ or facilitating learning. When combined with spacing, illustration,…

Nurturing a Relationship with Nature In the early years of our homeschooling, Charlotte Mason-style homeschooling was a big part of our days. Spending a good part of our days outside in certain seasons, we would often take our school outside as well. At some point, I came to the understanding that there were two different…

An Overview on How I’ve Taught Science over the Years I don’t think it’s a secret, but science is my favorite. Both my husband and myself are scientists, and even though I’ve been out of the field for a good many years, it’s my favorite thing to teach and experience. This week I’m going over…

We’ve previously gone over Window Stars from Squares, and I thought this week would be a good week to play with window stars again, but this time from rectangles. I’m sharing full instructions for four stars – three eight-pointed stars and one 16-pointed star. We’re using the familiar folds we previously learned that I hope…

Note-taking, Summarization, and Inference A few posts ago, I started a post on shifting from learning to read to reading to learn or cultivating reading comprehension. We focused mostly on close reading. This is the second part of that series where we will talk about note-taking skills, summarization, and inference work. Over the years, I’ve gained…

Experiencing the Movement of Patterns The beautiful forms of Waldorf are so memorizing. It’s easy to think I want to do this with my child. However, what is seen on paper is the very tip of the iceberg, and as I will describe several times over in this blog post today, so much goes on…

Engaging our Children in Observation to Learn Artists and their Works One of the things that we use from the Charlotte Mason pedagogy, particularly paired with history, is Artist Study. I really love the concept of Artist Study from Charlotte Mason because it can be a simple or complex as you want it to be.…

Exploring Waldorf water colors, especially wet-on-wet, through our Homeschooling Journey Let’s talk water colors! Waldorf is known for its beautiful water colors from wet-on-wet, to some main lesson pages, wet-on-dry and veil painting. When I made new paints a while back, I filmed the process of making colors and did a few wet-on-wet water color…

An Overview of our Language Arts through the years of our Homeschooling Journey There is so much contained in language arts that I feel I couldn’t possibly show everything that we do in one post. Instead, today, I’m going to try to give an overview of what language arts looked like as a whole over…

How to Establish a Rhythm and Schedule for our Homeschool This week we are talking about rhythm and schedule for our homeschooling. Many people coming to me aren’t sure how…

Finger Knitting and a Little Bunny Project I’ve talked about handwork being so useful in education for the whole child. It often has the task of giving something for our…

A Wonderful Way to Brighten your Waldor-ish Homeschool Space There is something about window star transparencies that bring me such joy. One of the moments of peace for me when…

Introduction When the house is in total disarray, I personally find it difficult to homeschool. I’m not the only one. I know that many wonder how to I keep the…

Looking Back at our Eighth Grade of Homeschooling We had our annual evaluation at the end of October this year. When I submitted our letter of intention to homeschool to…

Sharing My Family’s Favorite Tradition with You Some time ago when my children were much smaller, I saw a blog post about an activity advent calendar. I thought this was…

A Sampling of our Homeschooling Portfolios through the Years: from Early Elementary through High School A portfolio is a book or journal that contains pieces of a child’s work throughout…

A Walkthrough of our Homeschool Schedule Now and in the Past Our schedule has changed over the course of the years and as my children grow. When they were younger,…

An Analytical Tool that Encourages Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Connective Thinking Hexagonal thinking is a tool used to facilitate critical thinking and to “make thinking visible.” It can be used…

The Supporting Work in addition to our Main Lesson Blocks in our Homeschool Main Lesson Blocks are by far the star of the show. It is where the book of…

Some Tips, Tricks, and Techniques in Using Beeswax Modeling in your Homeschool Beeswax modeling is one of the many things that we use to keep our hands busy and have…

And a Look at Some of my Previous Planners I’ve finished the planning pages for this coming academic year, and I’m excited to be sharing them with you. I’ve made…

Looking Back at All That Was Accomplished This year was my daughter’s seventh grade year and my son’s first official year of community college. I say first official year because…