Healing Math Trauma
Including Non-Conventional Math Activities as Part or All of your Homeschooling Math Curriculum It happens easily enough. A concept is a little too challenging, there is one too many wrong answers, or the worst, it’s easy for someone else and a child thinks it should be easy for them too. Trauma or just a bad…
Modeling with Beeswax
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 something to do when we are listening to our main lesson books. In addition, this kind of small modeling is perfect for developing fine motor…
Keeping a Portfolio
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 the year. Not every piece of work needs to be kept. In fact, it can be quite thick if you do keep every piece of…
Water Colors in Homeschooling
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…
Memorizing the Multiplication Tables
Different Ways to Help our Children Memorize the Multiplication Tables One of the most common questions that I get is about multiplication. People want to know how to help their child memorize the multiplication tables. Memorization of the Multiplication facts takes time and consistency. This post will be about different ways to introduce and make…
Dying with Natural Plant Dyes
I love dying our eggs each year, especially the batik style eggs we do with beeswax resist. There is something soothing and meditative about the experience. It is only in the last few years that I have been able to truly enjoy it. When the children were little, I used to find it overwhelming; there…
Window Stars from Squares
There is something about window star transparencies that bring me such joy. One of the moments of peace for me when walking through my house in the early morning is seeing the rays of sun shining through the colorful stars in our dining area windows. We keep a crystal in the same window, and it…
Winter Ice Lanterns
A Tutorial on the Ice Lanterns that We Made during Christmas Break. Winter break from homeschooling this year brought record lows with the historic arctic blast storm. We had three straight days of hard freezes. That’s unheard of in North Florida. It very rarely snows here (maybe once in the 20 years we’ve lived here)…
A Homeschooler’s Review of the Book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools
How we are using the book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools to teach art in our homeschool. My daughter and I just started her sixth grade year of homeschooling. One of my favorite aspects of this year for our family is the introduction to charcoal in art. An interesting part of Waldorf pedagogy is…
Grade 5 Freehand Waldorf Geometry: Ellipse Exercise
We’ve been working on our freehand Waldorf Geometry block the last couple of weeks. Check my Geometry highlights on Instagram for more. We are using pushpins as string to first draw a circle from the center, and then moving the focus outward from the circle to see the changes in the circle. It’s a cool exercise just by…
Artist of the 1800’s and 1900’s
We do not usually do artist study separate from our regular studies. With our intertwining of Charlotte Mason (CM) and Waldorf, artist study is usually incorporated into a short CM-style lessons themed to accommodate our main lesson. Since we do history chronologically, this means most of our artists have reflected what we were studying in…
Wild Bird Egg Replica Project
When we arrived on birds within our animal block, I knew I wanted to replicate Hana’s, with Pepper and Pine, egg project. Her YouTube video has been so helpful in avoiding mistakes that I’m almost sure we would have made without her wonderful guidance. We made a couple of deviations from her process. We were able…
Making Mushroom Spore Prints
We love to go mushroom hunting. Our mushroom hunts are for spore prints. We do NOT eat our mushrooms. I wish I knew which ‘shrooms were edible and which were not, but alas… Goals! Spore prints are a favorite around here. I do not know how I made it all the way through my college…
Wax Resist Naturally Dyed Eggs
Dying eggs is just so gratifying, especially with natural dyes. When my children were young, it was overwhelming to use natural dyes and the best that I could do was a kit. As they have gotten older though, I am able to spend the time making the dyes, usually the night before. This year was…
Renaissance Unit
Renaissance art is some of my favorite art. I don’t know if it’s the depth of color or the intensity of the scenes, but I find it fascinating. The artists that created them are also fascinating. This has been one of our many history units this semester. And just in case you noticed that Shakespeare…
Paper Quilling a Snowflake
I added paper quilling to our handcrafts back in October with some pumpkins. This was the first bit of paper quilling that we had added to our homeschooling. It is a delightful craft and easy to do with children. The pumpkin is a nice beginning piece, because it goes over a few basic quilling techniques…
Peg Dolls Skin Tones Using Natural Dyes
Recently I was gifted several wooden peg dolls from Woodpecker Crafts. I had seen Hana with Pepper and Pine’s project of using natural dyes to color wooden peg dolls and was excited to try it. I’m hoping to incorporate these dolls in our Explorer’s Unit and upcoming homeschooling year when we focus on some of…
Games-Early Elementary
THIS IS A 4-PART BLOG SERIES ON GAMES. IT INCLUDES GAMES FOR PRESCHOOLERS, EARLY ELEMENTARY, LATER ELEMENTARY, MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL. THIS POST CONTAINS AFFILIATE LINKS THAT WILL HELP YOU FIND THE GAME EASILY. We have shifted from our normal structured homeschool style to a more unschooled style of homeschooling for the summer. With…
Golden Age of Islam (Middle Ages) Resources and Activities
Ramadan Mubarak! Though we are not Muslim, we have several friends and followers that are. I am saddened that they have to celebrate their holy month in the middle of the Corona pandemic. In honor of the month of Ramadan I’ve compiled our resources and activities for the Golden Age of Islam Unit that we…
Tree Unit Resources, Games, and Activities
New Blog Post: I’ve just finished a blog post going over the resources, game, and activities for our Tree Unit. This has been such a delightful unit. There is the usual list of games and book with details of our favorites and what each book contains in the post. In addition though, I go into…
Schooling at Home thru the Covid-19 Pandemic
Homeschooling is not school at home. It has a totally different look and feel to it. I think at a time like this we probably have enough stress, that to try to replicate school at home right now would be far too much. But I do have some ideas that can promote, encourage, and continue…
Paper-folding Fraction Activity
This is a math series follows our unit for introduction to fractions in grade 3. This is one of several. Look for the others by searching “fractions.” Though we are not completely finished with the number line work, it was Friday and the end of a busy week, so we were both looking for something…
Multiplication Circles
Last year sometime the oldest and I did a short unit on multiplication circles. Here are some resources for that unit. The first thing that I had him do was do the multiplication circle for the 2’s table and 3’s table. For the 2’s table, we connected the dots of the number we were multiplying…
Fall Window Cling Tutorial
One of our favorite things to do in the fall is to make window clings to place on our windows for decoration. There is a little bit of wait time involved, but this project is it rather easy one and a lot of fun. The overall project includes making lead lines with black fabric paint.…
Native American Inspired Beading Tutorial
I had some requests on instructions for the beadwork that my children did for our Native American studies. This activity can lend itself to a variety of ages. Some things to consider when choosing what materials might be appropriate for your child: The size of the loom. The size of the string and…
Leaf Prints for our Tree Study
Leaf prints are not difficult to do, but so gratifying when you see your creation, even for the youngest artist. We are studying trees for our naturalist unit, and leaf prints were an easy way to get a lot of new trees on the pages of our nature journals. It was a messy project taking…
Sumi-e for Japan
This year we have been doing a “travel buddies” geography for my youngest who is doing kindergarten, mostly because she doesn’t want to be left out of “school” and needed something like her brother. It has been so much fun. We were approaching Japan, when I had a spark of inspiration. Scrolling through my instagram…
Master Gallery-Exposure to Impressionism
I try to pair music, art, and literature with history. The reasoning is that perhaps this pairing will give them a reference, a framework, if you will, to how the art developed and existed in context. That is my hope anyway. A mother can dream. In history this session we studied Story of the World…
About Me
Hi, I’m Della. I’m passionate about homeschooling, and I want to share it with you.