The weather has started to cool off here bringing with it fires, sweaters, and hot mugs of tea. Tea … Hello There! Welcome to The Beauty of Play. This post is for my subscription members. I currently have two subscriptions: One for all things homeschooling and another for all things math. You can learn more…

A Simple Hand Sewing Project for your Homeschool Read Alouds or Lessons Handcrafts have been a larg… Hello There! Welcome to The Beauty of Play. This post is for my subscription members. I currently have two subscriptions: One for all things homeschooling and another for all things math. You can learn more about them  at…

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…

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…

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 in our homeschooling. Both of these pedagogies align heavily with my own whole-child educational philosophies. There are many tools that I take from Charlotte Mason’s…

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 to implement a rhythm in their homeschooling. I find that having a habit of a rhythm with some ‘rituals of connection’ to signal transitions in…

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 hands can do so our ears can listen, but in addition of that, it enhances our small motor skills, and it gives us something to…

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 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…

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 house clean, everyone fed, especially with all the snacks the kids are eating, and still homeschool. Today I’m going to talk about the different systems…

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 our county school board as we do in Florida, I intentionally set a day out into October to give myself a buffer of time. The…

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 great idea, especially with the focus being service oriented. I made all the envelopes, make all the activity cards, and gathered up all the…

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…

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, we schooled together more, almost exclusively, but our overall time schooling was less. As they have become older, there is more independent work and less…

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 lessons or read alouds. In addition, this kind of small modeling is perfect for developing…

What Different Tools of Learning Look Like within our Homeschooling When I first started homeschooling some 15 or so years ago, I was starting from scratch. I didn’t have a teaching degree or any other teaching experience. Thankfully, I had some great mentors of parents who were several years ahead of me, and there were…