Play and Learn
Support your child's natural curiosity with engaging, hands-on learning experiences. From gentle discipline and Montessori at home to sensory play, STEM activities, and outdoor exploration, this category offers inspiring, developmentally appropriate ways to make learning fun. Whether you're interested in child-led education, unschooling, or fostering creativity through play, discover practical tips and resources to encourage lifelong learning, independence, and joy.
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Children’s Books Recommendation – Large Family Library Haul
As minimalists, we do not like to keep a lot of items in our home. We do, however, absolutely love books. From picture books, storybooks, novels, and information books – we love them all. As a large family, if we were to buy everyone books to cover every topic that every child was interested in, we would have WAY too many books. In order to fulfil this love of books, we take advantage of our local library. These books were all greats, and definitely are children’s books we would recommend. We have 4 tiny humans who all read at different levels and enjoy different types of children’s books. Every time…
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Homeschool Sports – 5 Ideas for Physical Education Classes when Homeschooling
It is a common misconception that homeschooled children miss out on extracurricular activities or the team building experience that a typical physical education class would offer. You do not have to sacrifice physical education, or gym, when you make the decision to homeschool. There are many options for homeschool sports opportunities. Physical education classes can provide such a benefit to children, far beyond exercise. These sports programs allow our children to meet other children their age, develop friendships, learn new skills, and learn how to learn from other people. Our children can develop these skills while having fun and not even realizing they are learning. Playing is the best way to…
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Resources For New Readers
Teaching a young child to read can be the most rewarding and the most frustrating thing you can do as an educator. All of my children have learned to read in different ways and at different ages. We do not like to push this skill, as we believe that a stressful beginning to this journey will hinder the enjoyment down the road. We like skills to develop naturally and on pace with the individual child. One misconception about unschooling is that we do not teach our children. This is not true. We just do not teach our children in a traditional, curriculum related way. If you want to hear the…
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Please Don’t Quiz Child – Homeschool Storytime
While at the grocery store, my homeschool children were quizzed by a random stranger. This is our story...
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Questions For A Homeschool Mom
There are so many misconceptions about what homeschooling really is. The main reason for these misconceptions is that all homeschoolers are lumped together into one big category when, in reality, there are so many different types of homeschooling and homeschoolers. We are life learners or unschoolers. This does not mean that we do not educate our children. That is a misconception for another post. We do educate our children, just not in a very obvious way. There is no desk work, no worksheets, no classroom. Learning encompasses our entire life, and we learn through being apart of the world around us. I was recently invited to do a video collaboration on YouTube. …
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Top 3 Reasons Why We Homeschool
Making the decision to homeschool can be a hard decision to make. For some, it is a no-brainer. Perhaps you were homeschooled and it just makes sense in your mind and heart for you to homeschool your children. Perhaps it has always been how you wanted to teach your children. For others, deciding to homeschool can be a difficult decision. There are many factors that go into the decision-making process. We weighed the pros and the cons but knew deep in our hearts that we were destined to be homeschoolers. What are our reasons? Being There For Milestones Many parents think of milestones for their babies. Once they get to…
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Wonder by RJ Palacio – Book Review
Wonder is a story about August (Auggie) Pullman. August was born with craniofacial abnormalities. The story takes place as August enters the 5th grade. He had been homeschooled by his mother, but now he will join his classmates at Beecher Prep. Wonder is all about his journey through the fifth grade. I bought Wonder over a year ago. We were doing a scholastic book order through our school board and I asked the boys to pick out whichever books they wanted from the catalogue. One of the boys had circled Wonder. I ordered the book not knowing anything about it. When we got the book, I read the inside cover…
