New Homeschool Printable Planner Available Now!

I recently shared a video over on my YouTube channel showing the homeschool planner I created for myself this upcoming school year.  

I really wanted to create something that was exactly what I needed and be creative in the process.  I received so many messages that it was exactly what THEY needed, too! So I made a version available for purchase for anyone looking for a printable homeschool planner. I share all about the new planner here. PLEASE NOTE: These planner files ARE NOT editable. Many blank layouts are included with spaces for you to customize with your own handwriting.

Interested in purchasing? The planner is available in my Payhip store, which you can find here. Use code MOMMABLOG25 at checkout for 25% off until June 16, 2025.

Homeschool Planning: Schedule and Pacing Templates

     In a recent YouTube video, I shared my planning and scheduling process for our upcoming 2025/2026 homeschool year.

I find it really helpful to create a pacing guide for all of our curriculum to aid in scheduling out our year and making sure everything is going to fit in the allotted time.  It also helps me see how many times a week I need to schedule a particular subject, as well as schedule in enough cushion to allow for review or remediation and scaffolding. You can watch the full video here to see the details of how I did this.  So many people requested the templates that I used to organize our year, but because I do all of it in PowerPoint, not Excel, I have been having trouble finding a way to share the templates in a useful way. In the meantime, I have created templates in Canva that replicate what I make in PowerPoint.  If you have a Canva account (a free account is fine), and you are comfortable creating and editing in Canva, these templates might be useful to you.  Please keep in mind that if you input more text into any of the boxes than space allows, the box size will increase, which will push some of the bottom rows off the page. You can change the font size to a smaller font, or just delete the rows that go off the page. 

I have three templates available right now. Use coupon code MOMMAFREE to get them at no cost for a limited time. Click on the image(s) below to take you to the purchase page.

Victory Gardens!

Diana's White House Garden takes place in 1941 and America is at war.  This book is based on a true story about the ten-year-old daughter of then-White House advisor Harry Hopkins.  Diana wants to do her part to help the war effort on the home front.  She makes many well-intentioned attempts including trying to scare off enemies by sticking pins in the couch cushions, placing a "quarantine" sign on her father's office door, and spying on the housekeeper.

When President  Roosevelt urges citizens to grow their own food so that the produce grown on large farms can go to the soldiers, Diana finally finds a way she can truly help:  a Victory Garden!   She teams up with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and helps plant a garden right there at the White House.  A wonderful mix of history, gardening, patriotism, and childhood mischief.  We love the sepia-tinted illustrations done in a style that truly reflects the time period.  This is a new favorite in our house. 

It also provides a wonderful context for current-day discussions about growing our own food.  At the time of this blog post, we are in the middle of the global Coronavirus pandemic, our own enemy that needs to be defeated, and many of our struggles are mirrored in this story and time from the past.



We are using this book as a jumping-off point in our house to both study World War II and plant our own Victory Garden.  Here is a link to our mini-unit that I created to go along with our unit study. Included in the printable pack are hand-drawn garden marker cards that will be a great addition to your victory garden!  My daughter enjoyed using the Garden Map page to draw out where she wanted to plant each vegetable that she chose.  

Jack and the Beanstalk: History, Science, Math, and Language Arts, OH MY!

What do ancient Mesopotamia and Jack and the Beanstalk have to do with each other?  This was a really fun spin-off from our history unit.  In my daughter's second grade history lesson (we use Curiosity Chronicles) we were learning about the first farmers in ancient Mesopotamia.  One of the suggested add-on activities was a bean growing experiment to see how difficult it must have been in ancient times to begin farming without having all of the knowledge and tools that we do now.  We read a lot about growing from seed and what plants need to grow and thrive.  We placed lima beans in different ziploc bags, creating a different growing environment for each using cotton balls, mulch, water, etc., and taped them in a window.  We studied the life cycle of the bean plant with our model from Safari Ltd and then read about other crops that were grown at the time.  We really enjoyed Food Like Mine from the Children Just Like Me series.  The Pod and the Bog from the Zoey and Sassafras series was a great independent reading tie-in for my daughter, sharing all about what a plant needs to grow.

This idea of plants and growing our food, let this librarian momma to The Little Red Hen and Jack and the Beanstalk, to name a few. We read about barley, one of the first crops, and read The Little Red Hen. 

We read Seeds to Bread and learned about wheat, how it is grown and harvested, and the process of making it into bread.  We made barley soup, tried our hand and grinding wheat berries into flour for our biscuits, and continued to wait four our beans to sprout (or not)!  That week we read so many versions of Jack and the Beanstalk.  We read traditional versions told in old language, more contemporary versions that were easier to read, fractured versions and everything else in between.  I think we read over twenty different copies of the story.  We, of course, have a few favorites.  :)  My daughter's favorite was Kate and the Beanstalk by Mary Pope Osborne.  I think this was mainly because the main character was a girl, but also because it used a fairly traditional "Fee Fi Fo Fum" line that some of hte other versions we read did not have.  To be exact, the author used "Fee, fi, fo fum'un, I smell the blood of an english woman!"  I loved that is an empowering story for girls but still maintains some of the integrity of the original tale.  

A close second favorite was Jack and the Beanstalk by E. Nesbit. This seemed to be a more traditional telling, however, the illustrations were beautiful ,which is why it was one of my picks.  This version has a fairy in it, but none of the "Fee Fi Fo Fum" business.  It was a longer story and used older language that made it a little less accessible.  Lastly, we both loved the fractured version called Jack and the Beanstalk and the French Fries by Mark Teague.  This version has the giant and Jack bonding over their distaste for beans, and problem solving a solution to the overabundance of beans program, rather than just complaining about it.  Win, win.  

We played several of our fairy tale themed games ( Enchanted Forest game, Story Time Dice Fairy Tales,  Eboo's Create a Story Fairy Tale Mix-Up).


We also did some of the activities from this fun pack of Jack and the Beanstalk Fairy Tale Activities from Teachers Pay Teachers. We also used our leftover lima beans and made a fun story/sensory bin which both my 4 year old and my 7 year old enjoyed!

We finished the week by reading Jack and the Beanstalk Fairy Tale Fixers: Fixing Fairy Tales with Stem.  We were able to discuss how this version was a like our different from all of the others we'd read AND this one had three different STEM activities woven throughout the story.  The first two were related to bean-growing so we just talked about those rather than doing, since we'd already done our own experiment.  The last one we did was a fun one to using straws to make a sturdy enough beanstalk to hold Jack.  It was a fun way to experience the classic tale.  We had a fun week and it was a great way to tie in a bunch of other subjects into our history unit.  It made the learning opportunities greater and the time spent together richer. 

September STEM Challenge, Stories, and Activities: Apples

I love when I find new products that I can use to encourage learning, creativity, and logical thinking in my home!  We are planning to use these new Seasonal STEM Challenge cards from Carson Dellosa in our homeschool this fall for my second grader, but even if we weren't homeschooling, I would incorporate these into learning @ home activities! 

The card set comes with thirty seasonal activity cards, ranging everywhere from gravity and stacking apples, to how to make a trap to catch a leprechaun and how to build a zip line to rescue your Elf on the Shelf! 

Here are the resources that I've pulled together to use in September when we study all things apples!

The STEM Challenge card I have chosen is called Apples On Top.  The challenge is to try to stack five apples on top of each other in a tower and have them stand independently.

If you want to do more, there are several other apple and STEAM related activities on the back of the card, as well as a hint to accomplishing the challenge, and the science behind the challenge.

I love to include picture books into any type of learning so today I chose a few that featured apples falling from the tree and bonking someone on the head, much like the story of Issac Newton goes.   Ouch! by Ragnhild Scamell is a fun story story for fall.  Hedgehog just finished preparing her nest for winter when an apple falls from the tree and gets stuck on quills on her back.  And now she doesn't fit in her nest anymore!  Oh no!  Letting Go is in the Loopy Coop series of early readers by Janet Morgan Stoeke.  Pip, Midge, and Dot, the lovable and goofy hens of Loopy Coop Farm wrestle with the age old question--why do apples fall?  On their way to their own unique conclusion, they go from being scared silly to just plain acting silly. 

Newton and Me by Lynne Mayer is a rhyming story that takes us through the day of a young boy and his dog, Newton.  While at play, they discover the laws of force and motion and realize that Newton's Laws of Motion describe experiences they have every day and they recognize how the forces affect the objects around them.  Educational information is included in the back matter.   I had to add some good non-fiction and National Geographic Kids never fails to provide great information with phenomenal photographs.  Apples for Everyone did not disappoint.  I also pulled Gravity is a Mystery from the Let's Read and Find Out Science series.

Carson Dellosa also sells a non-seasonal STEM Challenge card set that looks like lots of fun, too!  Want both?  They sell a bundle with both sets.

I purchased the following activities from TeachersPayTeachers to round out the day.

3-D Apple Craft

Hedgehog and Apple craft

Life Cycle of an Apple

Invitation to Play: Dear Zoo Story Basket

Story baskets are a great way to encourage imaginative play while practicing early literacy skills.  Plays is one of the five early literacy practices that can help teach and encourage narrative skills, vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print motivation, and print awareness.  Reading, writing, singing, and talking are the other four important early literacy practices.  Your child can experience independent play and discovery if they are investigating this story basket on their own, or you can expand their exposure by reading and talking with them during one-on-one time with the tray.  I recommend a little of both independent play and one-on-one with parent or caregiver.

Story baskets, or story trays, are easy to put together with things you have around the house.  Little animal figures are a staple in our house--we use them for so many learning and play activities!  If you don't have them, you can use stuffed animals, or hand-drawn and colored pictures.  Depending on the story that you choose, you may find appropriate items in the kitchen, dress-up bin, or craft box.

The book Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell is been a long-time favorite in our family, so it made the perfect choice for this week's story basket.

Click the image above for a video of how I put together our tray. 

Here is what I included in this week's story basket:

-Safari hat 
-Safari LTD Jungle Friends TOOB  
-Safari LTD Pets TOOB
-Safari LTD Reptiles TOOB
-Brown decoupage boxes
-Dear Zoo Board Book
-Magnetic letters are from the dollar spot at Target.

Growth Mindset

I have to be honest, I hadn't heard this phrase until I attended my daughter's Kindergarten curriculum night last year.  But after hearing it, and doing a little research, I wondered where it had been all my life!  A person with a growth mindset believes that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work.  Instead of "I can't read!" they might think "I can't read YET." I have put together a list of excellent picture books that help support a growth mindset.  These are great books to have in your general home library, and also support lots of fun extension activities.  We were recently given a copy of the Growth Mindset print-ables from Big Life Journal to review.

We have done two activities so far.  First we read Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It to go along with the I Can Grow My Brain poster activity.  It was at a great level for my six-year old and my three year old listened to the story and helped us color.  We also read a favorite, Beautiful Oops!, and followed it up with the Take Chances, Keep Going worksheet where we got to finish the drawings left by raccoon and fox.

Here is a description of the Growth Mindset Printable Set from their website:  "This bundle of Growth Mindset Printables Set from Big Life Journal is designed to help children develop the mindset and skills they need to realize their full potential.  It's great for ages 5-11. This printable kit is different from Big Life Journal, none of the materials overlap.  The dynamic worksheets, activities, posters and coloring pages are designed to help children truly understand that they have the capacity to learn anything!  The colorful and engaging activities teach kids to pick themselves up after they fall down, find strategies to apply to challenging tasks, and persevere when learning gets tough.  The kit also contains valuable growth mindset handouts and guides for parents and teachers."

You can see my full video review here.

Hold my place!

We have a lot of books in our house, even though we use the library multiple times a week.  I try to go through periodically and "weed" out some that we don't NEED.  But we still have a lot.  For the most part I don't mind but it makes me happiest when they're at least organized.  The kids pull out lots of books and read them,which makes my momma heart happy, but they don't put them back very nicely, which, well, you know...  :)  I spent a lot of time sorting the books and finding ways to make it easier to access what we want and put them all back where they go and where there's room for them.  I have a pretty good system down in the kids' room and our play room, but the books in the living room were still giving us problems.  Target Dollar Spot to the rescue!  I've been drooling over YouTube videos of all of the new learning items people are finding at their local stores.  Luckily, my store hasn't stocked a lot yet, which is helping my fairly non-existent self restraint.  I did find these little beauties for $1 each.  As soon as I saw them I knew that they would be perfect. 

I believe they are meant to be pointers for teachers to use at the board with their students.  But we're using them as shelf markers!  When they pick out a book, they slide a shelf marker in its place.  When they bring the book back, they know right where it goes.  Of course, my kids think they're the coolest things ever.  Even if they don't become master shelvers, they are beginning to understand the concept of putting books back where they go so that we can find them again later.  I think we might start taking them to the library with us, as well. 

Library Scavenger Hunt

If you read my post about summer reading, you may remember me mentioning our library scavenger hunt cards.  I created these cards to use with my six year old this summer to help encourage her to spend time selecting books at the library before she plays.  I also want to begin to teach her about how things are organized in our library, including the Dewey Decimal System.  She has a lot of fun with these cards.  I have a huge pile of them that I printed on card stock and laminated.  She picks one from the pile on our weekly library trip.  We use a dry erase marker to check off what she finds. You can find the cards available here in my TeachersPayTeachers store.   As I mentioned in my previous post, I love that we have such play-centered libraries at our disposal, but I wanted to make sure that we were also slowing down a little bit to appreciate all of the books available to us as well.  I created around thirty cards that cover different Dewey numbers, as well as topics without their Dewey number.  I also created a "cheat sheet" bookmark with the Dewey categories on it for us to use as we're learning.

Before I introduced the cards for the first time, we read the book Do You Know Dewey?: Exploring the Dewey Decimal System to learn a little about the types of non-fiction and how they are organized in the public library.  For good measure, we also talked a little bit about how we should treat books, especially those that we're borrowing.  So far it's been a hit and she asks for the scavenger hunt card if I forget to mention it.  Our summer reading is going great and we're checking out lots of new and interesting books we might never have found before!

Play is the work of childhood

I'm not sure if I'm learning from my kids, or they're learning from me, but I think it's probably a little bit of both.  I'm always organizing activities for my kids, but today, they came up with something on their own and I was thoroughly impressed.  Ava was reading one of her library books Curious George Subway Train Adventure.  George gets to ride a subway train for the first time and, of course, accidentally leaves the man in the yellow hat behind.  Adventure ensues, as is expected, but so does learning about maps and direction.  When she was done reading Ava said "I'm going to make my own subway map" and then several hours of imaginative play followed.  She and her brother both made maps of an imaginary subway in our hometown and listed all of the places they would want the subway train to stop.

They used our glider as the train car and  played together (without fighting!) for hours.  They frequently checked their maps, visited all kinds of fun places, and pretended to get lost, miss the train, and other things that required some creative problem solving.  I had to smile because this is the exact kind of activity that I would offer as an extension of a book, and she came up with it all on her own.  Now part of her ingenuity might be because our playroom has been off limits for the past two weeks.  After it got so messy that you could no longer see the floor, my husband and I thought everyone needed a break from the playroom and the overwhelming amount of items inside of it.  While we go through and purge and organize, it has been locked up during the day.  We have noticed that the kids are getting much more creative in their play and are turning towards art and coloring more frequently.  I don't plan to get rid of all of their toys, but it has sure been a nice break.

Today's adventures reminded me of a quote from Mr. Rogers and I will leave you with that:

"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.  But for children play is serious learning.  Play is really the work of childhood."

Summer Reading!

One of the items on our Summer Bucket List is to sign up for the library's summer reading program and visit the library weekly.  My kids love books, and they love the library, but sometimes they have trouble wanting to look for books when we get to the library.  We are blessed with excellent, forward-thinking, kid-friendly public libraries in our area, and as they should, they all have lots of opportunities to learn through play.  The toys are amazing.  And we always take time to play when we're there.  But I wanted to find a way to encourage my kids to really spend some time selecting good books while we were there, too.  The Library Scavenger Hunt was born.  I will share more about it and how to get it in a later blog post, but here's a sneak peek.

Today we went to sign up for the summer reading program.  A little incentive for tracking your summer reading never hurt anyone and my kids were excited to sign up and get started. In addition to our library's summer program, I created my own for Ava to track her reading goals this summer.  I call it the "Summer Reading 100 Book Challenge."  When I was in first grade I loved to read.  To challenge me, my teacher gave me pages that had a caterpillar with boxes to write in the book titles that I read.  I was so proud of myself when I got to 100, and I still have that print-out somewhere today.  It's fun today to look back and see what books I chose to read nearly 35 years ago.  I wanted to offer something similar for Ava where she can write down the books that she reads this summer.  We've been enjoyed the sweet treats this summer so I went with an ice cream theme.  You can find the challenge printable to use yourself here.  If you have younger kids, you could skip writing the book title and just have them color a scoop for every book that is read to them this summer.  Make it work for you!

Added bonus:  This also helps to reinforce counting by 5s  :)

Summer Treats: Sensory play, crafts, and read-alouds

We've done math, cooking, and imaginative play--what's left?  Sensory play, crafts, and chapter books!  Whenever we are doing a theme week, I like to have chapter books that I can read aloud to the kids.  Sometimes we do this outside, but this particular week it was hot so we stayed inside.  We read a Boxcar Children book (I loved these as a kid!). The Ice Cream Mystery was perfect for this week and the kids loved it!  When I saw this fine motor skills craft idea on the blog A Dab of Glue Will Do, I knew it would be perfect for an activity at read-aloud time during our Sweet Treats week.  Both kids really loved it.  Ava enjoyed creating a pattern on hers while Wyatt just liked sticking down the tissue paper.  And they were so impressed with their final product.  Even better was that I already had all of the supplies on hand!

Kinetic sand really is amazing.  We don't bring it out every day but when we do, the kids will literally sit and be entertained by it for a few hours.  I thought it would be another good activity for them during read-aloud time.  I made a basket with some ice cream themed items, plus our sweet treats erasers, and put it out with their kinetic sand bins.  We store their sand in these Sterilite Clip Boxes.
When they're done we just put the lids on and store them away in the cabinet until the next time.  My kids love hiding things in the sand and then hunting to find it, so the little erasers were a big hit for that.  They also made sand sundaes and scooped extra large ice cream cones.  The mess was minimal, and again, I had everything on hand already.

We're finishing up the last few chapters of our book and I think we'll do that from beach towels on the living room floor.  Maybe their pretend play ice cream truck will make an appearance to help cool us all off.  :)

Ice Cream Truck: Invitation to Play

This is how we do an "Invitation to Play" in our house.  If you read Monday's post, you know that we were having fun with math and ice cream.   As we near the end of our "Sweet Treats" week, I thought it would be fun to let the kids have some imaginative play time.  We read the book The Little Ice Cream Truck (Little Vehicles), which Wyatt especially loved.  I asked if they wanted to make their own pretend ice cream truck and, of course, they did.  I gave them a basket of random play food and DUPLO ice cream toys, the play cash register, and let them have at it!  They decided to use their play table and chairs rearranged to be the truck.  Ava made the sign for their truck and then came up with a menu.  We all spent a lot of time being customers (too bad they weren't serving real ice cream)!  They did fight over the cash register a little bit.  We got ours at the thrift store a year or so ago, but you can find them on amazon, too.  It is the Learning Resources Pretend & Play Teaching Cash Register, and if we hadn't found it at the thrift store, it definitely would have gone on our kids' holiday wish lists!

They had a blast and it it was so fun to listen to them play.  Ava got to practice some math with the cash register, too.  I love the picture of Ava explaining the menu to my husband.  And Wyatt was pretty pleased with his purchase from the truck, as well.  They took turns being the customer, the cashier, and the "ice cream maker."  This entertained them for several days and it reminded me that I need to do these "Invitation to Play" days with them more often!  This cost us zero money because we used things we already had on hand, and took very little time to throw together.  Total winner in my busy-working-mom book.

And in the "real life" category:  Check out the impressive amount of fingerprints on our TV screen.

Sweet Summer Treats: Ice Cream

We read lots of fun ice cream stories this week, including Ice Cream Summer by Peter Sis and Gorilla Loves Vanilla by Chae Strathie.  Gorilla Loves Vanilla was especially funny, while Ice Cream Summer showed us all kinds of learning that can be done with ice cream, which was perfect for the activities that we had planned.

The Learning Resources Smart Scoops Math Activity might be my new favorite Learning Resources product.  It is so much fun and there is so much you can do with it.  You know I've said before that I like it when things have multiple uses across multiple ages, and this one fits the bill!  Ava can practice patterning and addition/subtraction with it, while Wyatt can practice sorting and counting.  And they can both have a ton of fun with imaginative play.  We had an ice cream shop going for a a few days in our living room!

We got a ton of play out of some packs of ice cream, popsicle, and fruit shaped erasers from the Dollar Spot at Target.  Ava used them to addition and subtraction, and Wyatt used them to practice counting.  I don't know about your kids, but my kids love little bits and bobs and they keep them entertained forever.  Even when they weren't doing math with the erasers, they were having a ton of pretend play fun with them.  

Don't worry, we didn't forget to end our day with ice cream!  We made a trip for milkshakes and added in some family playground time to round it out.