A Theme for February

It was the morning of January 31st and I sat at the breakfast table sipping my tea. Or possibly coffee, not sure which. Natasha was still in bed either sleeping late or reading and Lincoln had eaten his breakfast and was down playing. I was explaining to Daniel how I was discouraged with schooling at the moment. We weren't doing any of the fun stuff I wanted to do. Fun, in my mind being categorized as studying art, drawing, music and memorizing poetry.
I told him, "Sure we do the necessary history, science, math and writing, but nothing extra like I had envisioned back in September."
Thus I began to relate to him my research into the Simply Charlotte Mason Picture Study Portfolios.  All I would have to do was download an artist, print all the pictures and voila-we could do an artist study. But without a color printer, that sort of defeats the best cost option.
"I could do it all on my own, but I don't want to create my own curriculum," I whined, ever so slightly.
There are free artist study helps which are lovely, but again, I ran into printing issues. I still haven't figured out how to get an entire file to Office Depot to be printed, but I might revisit that another day.

Sitting around moping wasn't going to fix anything though and the next part of the day was before us. However, I popped onto Instagram and in my browsing, I discovered a Morning Time Bundle by Fresh Wanderings.
Oh my.
I do believe I breathed in and let out and got up with a spring in my step.
I was revived.
It had everything I was looking for and didn't want to put together myself:

A poem. 

An artist. 

A Bible verse. 

A musician. 

A theme. 

I started right away. I printed the little cards, so thoughtfully put together and stuck the appropriate ones on the wall where we could start memorizing. I loved how it wasn't overwhelming and yet had enough freedom for taking it as slow or in depth as we wanted. This. Was. Perfect. It helped that this month's theme included sheep, which I am quite partial to. 

It was one of those moments where I was incredibly grateful for the community of homeschooling mommas all around the country, who I don't even know, but who graciously share their abilities and curated schooling ideas, all on this app called Instagram. I will be the first to admit Instagram can lead me down a slippery slope of comparison, feelings of inadequacy and even envy. I have to take breaks and time away to keep things in the right perspective. But there are those moments when used properly, that Instagram can inspire and spur me on with new ideas and encouragement. This was definitely one of those times. Suddenly I was excited about school and doing all the fun subjects that we hadn't yet made happen.

So on one of these past snowy afternoons, we read about sheep from "The Handbook of Nature Study" (thanks Mom for handing that down to me) and drew sheep. We even dyed fabric with avocado pits and watched a great little video about fiber being made into fabric and learned why the song, "POP Goes the Weasel" has a "weasel" in it. It's not the animal weasel I've always imagined. 

It was indeed a good day.