Taking a look at the Live-Education 2nd grade Waldorf curriculum you'll find a unique approach to the subjects typically found in most curricula for this age. I will also give you a peek at the main lesson books my son made. There are no workbooks or textbooks in this curriculum, so you're going to have to actively participate to make this curriculum work.

It's one of the hardest things choosing a curriculum. Today, I'm sharing two boxed curricula that are Waldorf inspired. One more so than the other, yet one is more user-friendly than the other. I'm featuring the old version of the Oak Meadow 2nd grade curriculum you can only find second hand, but you can find the updated version of the curriculum at the Oak Meadow website

Do you want to make math meaningful, educational and enjoyable? It may seem like an impossible task, but it can be achieved! I've collected a number of living books and games to enhance our math main lesson block. These materials are suitable for students grades 1-3 but can be enjoyed by older students as well.

Here's a live homeschooling lesson for cursive handwriting for my 12-year-old son. Handwriting has always been a struggle for my boys, but with practice, they've definitely improved. I've teetered on the fence of whether or not to teach cursive handwriting and insist that my students master this skill. While I've presented and taught cursive handwriting to each of my students so far, I have not insisted that they master it or use it in their dictation, copywork or narrations.

If you watched my Nature Unit planning video, you know I scheduled a lot for this spring! It didn't work out though. It was too broad and too hard to plan, so I broke up that big unit into weekly units and it's been perfect!

So if you follow me regularly, and if you catch the date with our calendar peg dolls, you'll know this video is a tad late. For the fun of it, post the date you notice with our calendar peg doll. Our nature table got refreshed.

Ever since we started making suncatchers, we've been enjoying this beautiful craft. I think my friends and neighbors enjoy it too because they can see out decorated school room windows from the street.

I love it when I can mix art and science or art and math for that matter. Any lesson is an opportunity to pull out the watercolor paper and art supplies. For this lesson we are using our Tim Holtz Distress Inks as our watercolor medium for our Anatomy of a Monarch Butterfly.

Sculpey Ultra Light oven bake clay is my new favorite modeling medium! It's awesome!! Let me tell you why this is a must have item for your art supply stash or homeschool supplies. It comes in white and can easily be painted with various art mediums.

These monarch butterflies look so real, from a distance, you would think they were. We didn't intend to make so many. We just needed a few for a Life Cycle of a Butterfly project, but we (er, I mean I) got carried away and made about 20 of them! That's okay, I have lots of ideas on what to do with the extras.

I'm always surprised when my children want to felt. It's not the easiest craft and it takes a while to felt, but their projects turned out so cute! Especially my 7-year-old's caterpillar.True to her spirit and personality, she did her own thing, and it turned out better than both my son's and mine combined. Hers looks like a little puppy with ears and a nose and a super long skinny body. I love it!

I love adding watercoloring to our lessons when possible, and this monarch butterfly watercolor is a great beginner project. With just a couple of colors, you can make an extraordinary painting.

This started out as a simple project, but turned into a homeschool keepsake. I'm not even sure at what point it happened, but this project took on a life of its own! It pulls together three different projects we've done over the course of our Butterflies and Caterpillars unit.

Some peg dolls and fingers puppets end up looking super cute and charming while others look like a nice try. This peg doll is one such project in which all the extra time it took to make something I envisioned turned out pretty mediocre.

I think this Butterflies and Caterpillars unit was one of our favorite units this year. Well, at least I know it was mine. For my children, because there was little writing and a lot of hands-on activities, I think I can safely say they liked it too.

Are you looking for a small unit study on owls? I've got you covered! I know my unit studies tend to be long, involved and contain a lot of books, but this one is small, with a few beautiful books, a couple projects and a game to start off the lessons.

Art inspiration for chalk drawings usually comes from material we plan to use in our unit study or main lesson block. The Chalk Drawing for our Owl Unit is one we plan to keep up for the whole duration of the unit.

WoolPets are the best kits for beginners looking to try wool felting. The kits are also an amazing value, you can get at least 4 owls from this kit (the package says 2), and if they are a bit smaller, you can get 6 adorable owls :)

If you've never done an owl pellet dissection before, fair warning, it can be hard to stomach this activity. We took this project to the next level by assembling a complete rodent skeleton out of the remains we found in the owl pellet. While that wasn't our initial intentions, I'm really glad we did so, and I found it to be the most educational part of this project.

Finding hands-on projects for our unit studies and main lesson blocks brings me so much joy, especially when we can make adorable owl peg dolls like these. They were pretty simple to do, but had their challenges.

We love our Professor Noggin's Trivia Cards, so making our own was not just a fun way to make a game we know we'll love but it was also a great way to add essential skills to our lessons: research, synthesis of information, handwriting and drawing.

For years now I've noticed that our science units lack substantial written narrations. While some of our science units may include a fair amount of writing, most don't and we end up with unit after unit with the same blank main lesson book.

Whenever possible, I incorporate art into our lessons. It's not a art lesson, rather it's a science lesson that's artistically depicted. Sometimes art is the perfect medium for a lesson and when it comes to nature science, I can't think of a better choice.

Whenever possible, I incorporate art into our lessons. It's not a art lesson, rather it's a science lesson that's artistically depicted. Sometimes art is the perfect medium for a lesson and when it comes to nature science, I can't think of a better choice. Each spring, we pull out our nature units, and I find that our main lesson books are either wholly empty or filled with magnificent watercolors.

At the end of most units, I like to share which resources we used, liked, and didn't like and share the projects we did.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Every fall, we seem to add a new autumn inspired project to our repertoire, and this year we are knitting pumpkins! This tutorial is for beginners, but children and adults of all ages may enjoy this project.

This pocket dolly is easy and makes a great first project. The original pocket dolly project can be found in Elizabeth Seward’s book. However, I found that unless a child could sew the head, it required a lot of extra effort from the teacher.

How adorable is this little octopus?! What's great about it, it that it's super easy, easy enough for a brand new knitter. In fact, if you don't know how knit, I walk you through the basics, from one novice knitter to another ;)