When I started homeschooling a decade and a half ago, everything I did was school themed. I chose vintage school fabrics to cover chairs, painted very school room colors, and decorated with pencils. I had chalkboard signs, apple motifs, the whole thing. It felt like I was building a little schoolhouse inside our actual house, and at the time, that felt exactly right.

I really liked it then, but at the time, I also segmented our lives into school and not school time. We had a room we built out from the garage in our house to do our work in each morning, and then that part of our lives was kind of finished. We’d shut the door, and after that, we went and lived our normal, regular lives. School stayed in that room. Everything else stayed everywhere else.

Boy, how I homeschool has changed since then.

We still have our morning time to sit down and do our math, but school is just our entire day now. We read and write and talk and learn all day long, in the kitchen, in the car, curled up on the couch, out in the yard, so it didn’t take long for me to want our school to look like the rest of our lives do. If learning wasn’t going to stay contained to one room and one block of time, then why should it look different from the rest of how we live? The colors and themes we love in our regular real life should really be what our education looked like, too. It stopped making sense to me to have one aesthetic for “school” and a completely different one for “home.”

And once I actually sat with that thought, I realized what our regular life already looked like. It looks very cottage core.

I love florals and deep colors and nature, so school looks more like that now, too. Our shelves are full of things that are just as at home in a sitting room as they are on a school table. Nothing is labeled “educational” the way it used to be, and yet I’d argue we’re learning more from it than we ever did in that garage room with its chalkboards and pencil cutouts. I wanted to share some of the things I am using this year to help with that, because I know I’m not the only one who wants her children’s education to feel like it belongs in her actual home, not like a separate program bolted onto it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t start with this sticker book. The colors! The pictures! It’s all so beautiful, and it’s one we reach for again and again! I genuinely did not expect a sticker book to become one of the most-used items on our shelf, but here we are. My girls flip through it just to look at the pages even when we aren’t working on a project, and I love that it’s just as much a picture book as it is a craft supply.

This book is literally the cottage core handbook. All of my girls have gone through it now, and I adore what all they’ve learned. It covers everything from baking to bee keeping and it’s a book we reach for again and again for project ideas. There is truly something in it for every age and every interest, and I love that it’s the kind of book that grows with them instead of something they age out of after a year. Whenever I’m not sure what to plan next, this is the first place I look.

As we work on nature journaling, I wanted to focus on what colors we actually find in each month, and this book is a beautiful place to get inspiration! It stays on display on our current month, and as my girls pick their paints or pencils to journal with, I encourage them to choose these colors first. It’s such a small thing, but it’s changed how intentional their journaling has become. Instead of grabbing whatever color catches their eye, they’re actually looking outside, noticing what’s really there, and then matching what they see to the page. It’s turned nature journaling into something closer to real observation than just pretty pictures, which was exactly what I was hoping for.

My youngest daughter is starting on her age-appropriate version of Anne of Green Gables (I am excited to show you all what we are doing with that soon!), and one thing I wanted to work in was some folk tales and legends. This book is beautiful and does just that! It’s beautiful on our shelf, but I love that it gives details about each story, such as the story’s nation of origin, with each passage, and the artwork is stunning! We’ve started reading one story at a time in the evenings, and it’s become this quiet little ritual where everyone gathers around just to see what country we’re headed to next.

These bags were a lovely choice for each girl to use to hold their individual work, but to make it more fun, we used markers to personalize each one on our first day of school this year. My girls loved it, and I love anything beautiful and practical. There’s something about giving each of them their own bag, their own little space for their own work, that made the start of this year feel special without needing anything elaborate. It was a simple activity, but it set the tone for the whole year, and now each bag is unmistakably theirs.

These stickers were a fun addition for nature journaling or just using to decorate books or notebooks. The best thing about them (other than the fact that they are clear on the edges, so pretty!) is they come organized into different categories. As we work on trees or leaves or flowers, we can choose stickers directly from each category, which has made it so easy to pull exactly what we need without digging through a pile of mismatched stickers. It’s a small organizational detail, but it makes a real difference when you’ve got more than one child reaching for the same sheet.

One of the art mediums we are focusing on this year will be watercolors, and this set has such a wide variety of colors. I love the versatility it offers, and it allows for full creativity as we paint nature and learn landscapes! There’s a color for nearly everything we’ve wanted to paint so far, from the deep greens of the tree line behind our house to the softer, dustier tones we’re seeing show up as the season starts to shift. Having that range on hand means the girls aren’t limited by their supplies when they’re trying to capture something they actually saw outside.

Ultimately, weaving our children’s education throughout our life has made their education so much more beautiful and natural. It’s the very definition of cottage core, and I’m so thankful we have taken that leap. Looking back at those early years in our garage schoolroom, I don’t regret a bit of it. That version of homeschooling was exactly what we needed at the time, and it taught me a lot about how to build a rhythm for our days. But I’m grateful we didn’t stay there. Letting go of the idea that school needed its own separate room, its own separate colors, its own separate identity from the rest of our life has made our days feel so much more whole. There’s no more walking out of a room and leaving “school” behind, because school isn’t a room anymore. It’s woven into everything, the same florals and deep colors and nature that we already loved, and I think that’s exactly how it should be.

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