Special Holiday Meals: A Hobbit Inspired Menu w/printable menu

Published on September 18, 2025September 28, 2025 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog4 Comments

My family loves the Hobbit books and movies, so when I saw that there was an actual ‘Hobbit Day’ on September 22nd, I had to make a note of it on our Fall Perpetual Meal Plan. Last year, we were in the middle of wedding prep, followed by hurricane prep, so it kind of got forgotten about. This year, my kiddos have not let me forget!

We worked together to make a menu so that we can celebrate… we might even watch the movies, if we can! We might also enjoy our Elevenses outdoors under our garden arches… so many ideas. Our kids love reading and we love to encourage them so this is a cute way to keep that spark ALIVE!

Continue reading →

How We Homeschool: 4-Day Sample Schedule

Published on May 13, 2025November 18, 2025 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog3 Comments

I thought it might be helpful to show how we go through our lessons for a week here so that you could give it a test run to see what might work for your home and schedule. Some things we do every day while others might have a specific day of the week or they may be done on even/odd days to work with our schedules.

We also try to have a four-day week with one day off for ‘Life Skills’ as there are lots of doctor appointments, errands to run, and sick days around here plus the gardens and animals keep us a little busy at times. I’ve tried to provide as many links as I can for demonstration purposes if you want to give this a test run but for more detailed information you can check out this post:

Our 2025-2026 Homeschool Curriculum, Schedule Plans, Resource Links, and Daily Routine – Tons of FREE resources!

Continue reading →

Our 2025-2026 Homeschool Curriculum, Schedule Plans, Resource Links, and Daily Routine – Tons of FREE resources!

Published on April 26, 2025November 18, 2025 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog5 Comments

It’s that time of year again for us… time to get the next school year planned out. We technically finished up our 2024-2025 school year before Easter but I’ve been busy with the garden and such so I am just now getting around to making our new schedule.

It is always SO TEMPTING to take a few months off to just focus on this house but I know from past experience that this doesn’t go well and that it takes FOREVER to get a couple of the kids back into the school routine. You can read more about last year’s curriculum and routines HERE.

Having a little extra wiggle room in our schedule means that we can take off more time around the holidays and I can take a week off for new grandbabies too! We also love taking the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas to just reflect on the reason for the season and it gives us time to do fun things with the family too.

Last year we switched to more of a Charlotte Mason-style approach and it was GREAT for the most part. We still have a couple of kids who just hate anything to do with math so that’s been a little challenging but we’re making progress. We’ve also really enjoyed using some of the FREE courses with Under the Home Homeschool.

A couple of the kiddos went with one of their big sisters and husband for the weekend so the house was surprisingly quiet… I used the time to sit down and get our new year planned out and organized. We will have an ‘official’ kindergartner this year too… sobbing quietly to myself… that means a little extra planning to include her but she already sits with us during school so it shouldn’t be too much of a transition.

Shyanne’s journey has been miraculous and to see her doing so many things that we were told she’d never do has been such a blessing in so many ways!

FREE Homeschool Planning Scratchpad

Continue reading →

Victory Gardening for a Homeschooling Win

Published on February 19, 2024February 23, 2024 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog3 Comments

I have written a little about Victory Gardens in past posts but recently I went so far as to incorporate them into our homeschool curriculum!

We used the booklet found HERE to calculate how much food we would need as individuals and for the family as a whole. Then we calculated how many rows of each vegetable we would need to supply those needs.

Using those numbers we were then able to calculate how much space we would need for a Victory Garden that would supply us with the majority of the fruits and veggies that we would need to give us an adequate amount of nutrition. This was a little more complicated than we originally expected and it took us several days to calculate the number of beds and rows that we would need.

Continue reading →

January 2024 Blog Roundup

Published on January 30, 2024February 22, 2024 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place BlogLeave a comment

We made it through January! I sometimes find it helpful for me to see what posts and resources we have used over the past little bit and to see what other people have been looking for as well. Here is a quick round-up of just those things from our blog this past month.