The weather is beautiful. Everyone wants to be outside but there is still so much learning to do! Whether we are long-time homeschoolers or we have been drafted into the position by the COVID-19 quarantine there is still reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and history to cover. When the children have lost focus and we have too, what’s a parent to do?

One of my favorite spring books is Lola Plants a Garden by Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw. Lola is learning nursery rhymes. She likes Mary, Mary Quite Contrary. She’s interested in the flowers and their names. Mom and Lola go to the library to research flowers, buy seeds and then plant a garden. During the wait for flowers to grow, Lola decorates her garden with crafts of silver bells and seashells. She also makes a Mary puppet. After the garden has grown she has a party for her friends in the shade of the sunflowers.

Are you getting ideas? For science – researching flowers and plant life-cycles, planting seeds, science journals? For math – laying out a garden, making crafts with simple shapes, measurement in cooking? At the end of the book, Lola writes a poem about her garden. Aha! Here’s our idea for English. Can your child write about their garden? Can they make up a simple poem? Everything in true education is intertwined just like in our lives. We mesh every feature of pigeon-holed education into one on-going experience and it often begins with research like Lola’s visit to the library. A visit to a garden center would be a good idea too, as would researching online.

Oh, we forgot history. I was saving history for last. When we’re all tired from a day’s work, the older children will enjoy researching the origins of Mary, Mary Quite Contrary. I’ll give a little teaser here. She’s Queen Mary I or better known as Bloody Mary. The older children, especially the boys, may want to find out what she did with “silver bells and cockle shells”. Hint: they weren’t flowers. In the meantime, they’ll be learning some important church history that may actually strengthen their faith.

So go read in the shade. Make a garden. Plan and make crafts. Then around an evening campfire tell the tales of a wicked queen and the brave Christians who defied her.

Blessings, Gail Cartee