What attracted me to the Montessori philosophy when we first started homeschooling was its emphasis on teaching toddlers and preschoolers practical life skills. My daughter was using a knife early on (she’s not quite 3 in that post).

I strongly believe that kids should be included in food prep early on. My 11 month old stands at the kitchen counter and watches me prepare dinner. She munches on zucchini, or whatever I am cutting at the time. Soon she’ll be able to help me stir or add things to a mixing bowl. When we lived in Costa Rica and I had a huge kitchen island, I would set up my then 3 month old son on his tummy time pillow so he could watch his sister and I prepare dinner. My oldest was 2 at the time and would tear lettuce for our salad. My kids have always been in the kitchen with me.

Here’s a video to get you and your children started with knife skills.

Morning Time is a time in which we gather together to focus on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. We’ve been doing a “together time” since before I even knew it had a name. However, reading Your Morning Basket this year and listening to the Your Morning Basket Podcast has helped me be especially purposeful in what I put in our morning basket.

These are all linked to Amazon for your convenience. Nurturing Learning participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and receives a commission at no extra cost to you if you complete a purchase through our Amazon links within 24 hours of placing an item in your cart.

Our Morning Basket Contents

We have daily items and weekly items. We often do not get to everything. When I was in teacher college, we learned to always prepare more than was needed and I got into that habit and seem to still do this in home educating. This list is my ideal – the “if-all-goes-perfectly-and-the-baby-sleeps -and-the-others-don’t-argue” list. Before the baby came along ten months ago, it was much easier to get through all the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in this list in one morning, fitting in all the weekly things too. Now, everything gets rearranged and sometimes (many times) we can’t get to it all. It’s okay with me. I basically put a timer for one hour and see how far we get. Next day, after prayer and religion, I will pick up where we left off on the list and cycle through.

1. Prayer and Bible
2. Religion Loop: we cycle through these, choosing one each day.
   1. Catechism
   2. Saint story
   3. Life of Our Lord for Children
   4. First Communion by Mother Loyola (she wrote our all-time favorite too) Even if you aren’t preparing for First Communion, I highly recommend First Communion. Every time I read a portion of it to the kids, I am inspired to be a better follower of Christ and to renew my effort in looking toward eternity. Mother Loyola just has a gift for being able to write for children without dumbing anything down, so her writing actually really speaks to adults’ hearts, too.
3.  Poetry Loop: we read one poem (or one page) per day rotating through the following and strive to memorize the ones from resource #3 and #4.
   1. Ambleside Online Year 3 poems
   2. Ambleside Online Year 1 poems
   3. The Harp and Laurel Wreath
   4. Poetry Memorization from IEW
4. Habit Training:  Laying Down the Rails
5. Scripture Memory: psalms from the Prayer resource we use
6. Hymn and Folk Song: I have kind of dropped hymns (gasp) because the kids get to sing hymns in our church choir. We were using this hymn book in last year’s morning time. And for folk songs, we LOVE the Little House Folk Song book, but this American Song Treasury was our favorite before. We also sometimes dip into From Sea to Shining Sea, but I like the song treasury better.
7. French and/or Spanish read-aloud– we have a lot of books in these languages but I sometimes also find some at the library. Our favorite French books are the Emilie books. I also use Cherrydale Press French and Spanish books in this slot, but not both on the same day!
8. Literature – this one is always changing and is usually from the Year 1 or 3 Ambleside Free Read list. However, currently we are reading Canadian Summer. If you haven’t read the three books about the Mitchells, you really should. They are humorous and lovely; my kids love them.
9. Music Appreciation: now that we’ve done almost all the SQUILT volumes, we are just following the Ambleside Online Composer study once a week.
10. Picture Study: I print off the Ambleside Online suggestions and laminate them and we narrate one print per week.
11. Math: I recently added a fun math book to our mornings a couple of times per week to try to spark some more “wonder.” I’ve also added Mathematicians Are People Too.
12. Geography and Art History – I realize that is a lot of geography titles, but they are all different and we enjoy all of them. It might just take us longer to get through them. The following are on a loop:
    1. Hillyer’s Geography
    2. Charlotte Mason’s Geography
    3. Long’s Geography
    4. Hillyer’s Art History (I have a super old edition that includes Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture).

So there you have it. It seems like a lot, but it is all things we love and look forward to, and we aim for one hour and then move on and if there’s some extra time later in the day, we might continue some more readings, or, more likely, we will just go outside and enjoy being in nature instead.

The “Focus and Align” class held over in the Read Aloud Revival Membership site helped my husband and I form a bit more of a vision for our homeschool journey. Sarah made us think about what we wanted our children to remember about homeschooling twenty years from now. I’d never really thought about it that way before.

Here was my train of thought scribbled out on my worksheet from the class:

I want the kids to chase wonder, pursue holiness, encourage others, study God’s word, pray, appreciate beauty (especially of nature), cultivate their virtues, love and serve others, be readers and thinkers, and expand their horizons. I want the kids to remember our liturgies as being “steeped in Christ“. (Thank you, Ashley, for the beautiful way you put that in your post about liturgies.) I also want the children to pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and immerse themselves in those three things.

How this translated into our Rule of Seven:

1. Enjoy beauty:

Whether it be in beautiful art, a radiant sunset, a melodious song, or simply a single blade of grass, beauty leads to God and His Creation. Were it not for beauty, I never would have found God, because my conversion story involves astounding Swiss country landscapes and the awe of the towering, snow capped Alps.

2. Explore the world:

Knowing your world and seeing how others live builds empathy. Travel across the globe, strolls through museums, touring science centers, romping along on nature hikes – it all counts toward building appreciation for others, and the world we live in.

But this rule, Explore the World, also means Expand your Horizons to us. As in, “Don’t limit yourself.” It is closely associated to Rule Number Five.

3. Nurture relationships:

In my husband’s culture, you kiss and hug when you greet people. For an introvert, that’s pretty hard to do. Nevertheless, it’s considered extremely rude if you don’t, and my children struggle with this. So my husband stuck this rule in. Nevertheless, it also applies to sibling relationships since those last a lifetime. I pray our children will always be close friends.

4. Do meaningful work:

Make your work count, be it chores or school, or your job. Do it unto the Lord. Bring Him glory through what you do. Carelessness in math is unacceptable, as are chores done halfway (and my frustration with this fact is what prompted this rule).

5. Pursue Passions:

Dream and do what you love to do. Don’t limit yourself because of fear of failure.

6. Read excellent books:

Life is short. Pick the quality reads. Discourage the twaddle. Reading the classics and other well written books will provide ideas on which to ponder and thus create thinkers.

7. Converse with God:

I left the most important for last on the list so it would be the last thought on the mind every time we looked at it. Pray, read your Bible, sing hymns and psalms. All these things lead to Jesus and are part of our communication with God. Conversing with God implied being in a relationship with God (because I will argue that you can go through the motions of praying, reading the Bible, and singing hymns and psalms without really having your eyes on the kingdom of God) and thus why I chose the wording.

So there you have it. Our Rule of Seven.

And this is our hope: to train our children to be thinkers who make wise choices grounded in Truth. We aspire that our children pursue their passions, explore the world, and delight in their work. Moreover, we desire that they be responsible, caring, empathetic people who nurture relationships, being a reflection of God’s love on all they encounter.

As we strive to spend more time out in nature, we find our nature collection growing. When the kids were younger, it comprised mostly of rocks and sticks. Now, at 6 and 8, they are becoming discriminate and our nature collection has becoming more varied.

We use three shelves as our main nature display. I wish we had something like a letterpress drawer to display some of it on the wall, but for now we use acrylic containers salvaged from my parents’ house, thrifted wooden bowls, and unused vases to contain our nature items on the shelves.

We have the good fortune of a nature center which rewards nature items with points. With these points, one can purchase other nature items. Points can also be earned by doing nature projects, doing scavenger hunts at the nature center, and filling in a reading log. The kids have “bought” gypsum rocks, porcupine quills, moonstones, and other items.

We found a dying butterfly at Kroger one day in the fall and brought that home for the collection

We also have many gems and fossils from our days of being members of the Tellus Museum.

Ideas for your nature collection display:

1. think outside the box and be creative
2. repurpose what you have around the house
3. visit thrift stores for pretty dishes and bowls
4. have tools for observation – magnifying glass, jewelers loupe, microscope (that is the one we own and enjoy)
5. use various acrylic containers
6. include field guides nearby
7. frame your nature
8. group like items together and create labels (these chalk markers work well)
9. have nature journals handy
10. add beautifully illustrated nature books – like this one, or this one, or Brambly Hedge, or Beatrix Potter books.

“Consider, too, what an unequalled mental training the child-naturalist is getting for any study or calling under the sun––the powers of attention, of discrimination, of patient pursuit, growing with his growth, what will they not fit him for?” -Charlotte Mason

Keeping a nature collection allows the wonder for the outdoors to continue once you come inside. I’m all about nurturing my children’s wonder for God’s creation. On your next rainy day, when nature study comes up on the homeschool loop, all you have to do is reach for the display, take up one item and wonder at it out loud and watch the children wander over to wonder too.

{This post contains affiliate links of items that we use and like.  Thank you for your support of this blog and our family by purchasing through our link. Note that anything you purchase once you click through one of our Amazon links will result in supporting the blog.}