morning time just got SO much simpler!

Does this sound familiar?

You heard of the magical tradition of morning time. You dreamed of mornings full of goodness, truth, & beauty other moms told you about.  Immediately you knew you wanted to put it into practice. 

And then you…  

  • scrolled & searched 

 – nevermind you had no idea what you were looking for

  • purchased plans to help you “DO” morning time –

– nevermind the struggle to realize someone else’s vision of morning time 

  • printed all the art pieces to show your kids –

– nevermind they never got used

  • created long “wish lists” of resources & books to add to your “morning time”

– nevermind the overwhelming scope of options

  • couldn’t get your kids to even pay attention

-nevermind getting them engaged

Mama friend, STOP searching & scrolling for the solution

EricaMendenhallPhotography_SHB_0057

Gathering Placemats make morning time effortless, meaningful, & special!

simplicity

the Gathering Placemats are curated for you! Just buy, print, & share with your kids!

goodness

the Gathering Placemats are filled with fun facts, delightful poetry, & simply silly jokes to surprise and delight your kids

truth

the Gathering Placemats include Bible verses & favorite hymns to share with your kids

beauty

the Gathering Placemats feature large, gorgeous prints of some of the world's most esteemed art

connection

the Gathering Placemats ask questions to get the conversation going around your kitchen table

GATHERING PLACEMATS ARE THE SIMPLE SOLUTION TO YOUR MORNING TIME WOES

GET a SPECIAL, LIMITED TIME PRICE!

TWO OPTIONS TO CHOOSE FROM!

GET A FALL SET to get started

Each set of Gathering Placemats includes 4 placemats with:

    • 4-5 beautiful pieces of art
    • a hymn
    • a Bible verse
    • memory work
    • poetry
    • nursery rhymes
    • and MORE!!

The front of each placemat in the set is the same, featuring the hymn, a poem, & a Bible verse.  Each back is different with various boxes of interest for kids (& adults). 

The Fall Gathering set includes: 

  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021

Get 12 Gathering Placemats when you purchase the Fall Gathering! 

$18 now $15

or get the ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR SET

Each set of Gathering Placemats includes 4 placemats with:

    • 4-5 beautiful pieces of art
    • a hymn
    • a Bible verse
    • memory work
    • poetry
    • nursery rhymes
    • and MORE!!

The front of each placemat in the set is the same, featuring the hymn, a poem, & a Bible verse.  Each back is different with various boxes of interest for kids (& adults). 

The 2021-2022 Gathering Placemat set includes: 

  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022

Get 36 Gathering Placemats when you purchase the Gathering for the 2021-2022 School Year! 

Plus: 

    • Get access to Gathering Playlists each month to bring audio to your Gathering tradition 
    • Get a monthly email with Gathering extras, extensions, and tips for making the most of your Gathering tradition

 

$54 now $36

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The Gathering Placemats are SUPER simple to use.  Just follow these three steps:

1. Buy the Gathering Placemats. 

2. Print & laminate for durability.

3. Share the Gathering tradition with your family. 

September 2021 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Jan van Eyck's religious art

October 2021 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Jan van Eyck's attention to detail

November 2021 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Jan van Eyck's studio artists, taught and inspired by the master

Are Gathering Placemats for you?

If you are a seasoned homeschool mom, looking to create NEW, meaningful traditions Gathering Placemats help you:

  • Connect with your kids in conversations about art, music, & BIG ideas
  • Gently pursue truth with your kids with memory work & facts
  • Share hymns, spiritual songs, & Classical music with your kids with custom Gathering Playlists
  • Contemplate great works of art with simple conversation starters for art study

What do the Gathering Placemats look like?

Each set of Gathering Placemats includes 4 placemats with:

      • 4-5 beautiful pieces of art
      • a hymn
      • a Bible verse
      • memory work
      • poetry
      • nursery rhymes
      • and MORE!!

The front of each placemat in the set is the same, featuring the hymn, a poem, & a Bible verse.  Each back is different with various boxes of interest for kids (& adults). 

Get 36 Gathering Placemats when you purchase the Gathering for the 2021-2022 School Year! 

I am a homeschooling mama to four kids and writer over at Simple.Home.Blessings.  For almost 10 years I have been sharing the simple solutions to problems I have in our home.  I figure if a hard-won solution is a blessing for me, it might be a blessing for you.  

Here's one of the problems I solved in my home:

The feast of education is MASSIVE!  There is just so much I wanted to show my kids.  When we stop to contemplate fundamental concepts like – goodness, truth, & beauty – coming  to rest in our homes, it can seem almost overwhelming! 

Before I started curating the Gathering Placemats, I was paralyzed by the abundance of options – none of which seemed the right fit.  Not only could I not narrow it down, I didn’t even know where to start.  I was unfocused and unable to figure it all out

I knew there had to be a simple solution to my problem. 

After trying & failing to implement the morning time I had dreamed of – where goodness, truth, and beauty were front and center – a spark of inspiration from a cereal box set off a new treasured family tradition for us. 

While I was still trying to figure out what morning time looked like for us, I leaned in & started to pay attention to my kids.  One day I realized the cereal box could hold their attention easily.  Not exactly truth, goodness, & beauty…but at least I could see what they what held their attentions. 

After examining the cereal box, I realized I could make something unique for our morning time – something bright & colorful, something with actual beauty.  Instead of cartoon drawings & inane information, I could include beautiful art, life-giving truth, & all sorts of good things!  I could finally capture my kids’ attention & CONNECT!

Gathering Placemats are my morning time solution! 

Gathering Placemats provide a place where the feast of education is in small enough bites for my kids.  My kids can take in the vast array of goodness, truth, & beauty a little bit at a time.  And they can savor the delights of the feast throughout a month.   What’s more, I can enjoy it with them!  I, too am feasting at the table of education alongside my kids. 

Gathering Placemats Feature:

What inspires the Gathering Placemats?

Our homeschool is what I would describe as firmly Classical with Charlotte Mason leanings.  

What does that mean for the Gathering Placemats?  Well, it means you will find all sorts of delightful things to grab your children’s attention and give them a heathy serving of goodness, truth, and beauty at the start of their days. 

We are a Classical Conversations family.  That means you will find memory work which looks familiar.  I try to draw from various educational strands when I can.  I like to add some history to our art study.  Or some language learning to our math.  I try to make each box on the placemats an opportunity for conversation

We draw from the riches schedule from Ambleside Online for art, hymns, and other music.  So, if you are following along with any of the AO years, you will find the Gathering Placemats work on the AO schedule.  The riches are what make the AO curriculum sing and they are what make the Gathering Placemats POP!  Those gorgeous full-color prints of famous works of art are swoon-worthy indeed.  

We tend to be a rather silly and rather chatty family.  We are constantly playing word games with one another and making up silly jokes.  Thus, the Gathering Placemats have lots of word play, lots of riddles and jokes, lots of opportunities for kids to express their own cleverness

December 2021 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Giotto's Life of Christ series from the Scrovegni Chapel

January 2022 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Sandro Botticelli's allegorical secular works

February 2022 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Sandro Botticelli's religious art works

Are Gathering Placemats for you?

If you are an intentional traditional school mom, looking to supplement & support your child’s learning, the Gathering Placemats help you:

  • Discover new & exciting things with your kids before sending them off to school
  • Build a strong foundation of truth with Bible verses & hymns to memorize
  • Actually know what your kid learned because you learned it alongside him – no more shoulder shrugs in response to the question, “What did you learn at school today?”
  • Explore beautiful art pieces & have conversations about beauty; noticing and evaluating art without having to take a field trip

All the curation & hard work is done for you. Now you can effortlessly:

EVERYTHING INCLUDED IN THE GATHERING PLACEMATS FOR 2021-2022

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Imagine if YOU were able to:

...SHARE the educational feast with your kids a few bites at a time

...CONNECT with your kids through meaningful conversations

...SAVOR a morning time tradition alongside your kids

...finally SHOWCASE all the riches you want your kids to see

March 2022 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Sandro Botticelli's most unique works.

April 2022 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Caspar David Friedrich's nature inspired paintings.

May 2022 Gathering Placemats

Feature artist Caspar David Friedrich.

Are Gathering Placemats for you?

If you are a new homeschool mom, looking to create good consistency & habits, Gathering Placemats help you:

  • Create a time & a space to explore a morning time tradition with your kids
  • Engaging content & conversation starters so you can pursue truth with your kids
  • Avoid the overwhelm & burnout of trying to get to all-the-things in the first week of homeschool
  • Share all the truth, goodness, & beauty you knew you would be able to share because of your choice to homeschool. 

FAQs

I introduced our Gathering placemats to my kids three years ago and I was blown away at how much they enjoyed them!  They would choose favorites and fight learn to trade well with one another throughout the month.  They would start to memorize poetry, Bible verses, and hymns without effort! 

We did not take on all the information in the placemats on at one time.  The luxury of a month of riches to savor became precious to us!  We fell in love with this resource.

Every morning, my son requests that I sing the hymn for him. He is noticing the things on the placemats so much that we worked on his first natural sight words out of Psalm 100! It blesses this Mama’s heart immeasurably!

The instructions are on the front page of each downloadable set of placemats. The idea is for these to be used as place mats, front and back.  Print pages 1 and 2, front and back; pages 1 and 3 front and back; pages 1 and 4, front and back; and finally pages 1 and 5, front and back.  I laminated them  to make sure they last through the month.  The front page is the same for all my students and the backs are all different.  This way the kids can trade them as the month proceeds.

I have an eclectic approach to our homeschool.  We heavily lean on classical principles, but I like the Charlotte Mason approach to many things.  I enjoy Ambleside Online’s resources and schedules and find they fit the rhythms of our year nicely.  I do not always do three months of the artist AO recommends. 

We are a Classical Conversations family, so some of the boxes are inspired by that.  Meaning I will intend them to be extensions of the Foundations curriculum, not the specific memory work (other than skip counting). There are some boxes that will definitely help Foundations and Essentials family’s pound those memory pegs in.

Yes! I believe you are going to love the Gathering Placemats, but if for some reason you are disappointed with your purchase, I am able to offer refunds within 7 days of purchase.  If you are unhappy with your purchase or have a problem with your purchase, please email me

I take on a few items each Gathering time.  Sometimes we talk about the art pieces.  Sometimes we recite the poem or the Bible verse together.  I put in some super simple boxes for my little ones because I have an age range from 10 to 4.   

The kids are welcome to explore them on their own during our Gathering or throughout the day, but I don’t feel the need to get to everything every single day. 

We pair these place mats with a Spotify playlist with the featured hymn (usually a vocal version and an instrumental version), a folk song, and some Classical music.  

Each month I prepare a new set for my kids. New placemats, new playlist; refreshed excitement!

Yes!  There are what I call evergreen sets, which may be used at any time of year.  

You can check them out in our shop

I started creating these simple Gathering placemats for our morning time. We call it Gathering simply because my invitation to begin our family’s special time is, “Gather ’round!”

Our Gathering was super simple in the beginning. It included Bible time, singing, and poetry. And honestly, that is all we had time for.

After I created the Gathering Placemats we were finally able to gather around all the goodness, truth and beauty I wanted to show my kids! 

The Gathering Placemats are a digital product.  You will receive a link to your purchase immediately upon successful checkout.  You will also receive a receipt with links to download your product.  The digital copies are yours to keep forever.  I recommend downloading them to your computer to ensure you have them when you are ready for them. 

You will not get a physical product through the mail. 

Start your family Gathering tradition today

GET a SPECIAL, LIMITED TIME PRICE!

TWO OPTIONS TO CHOOSE FROM!

GET A FALL SET to get started

Each set of Gathering Placemats includes 4 placemats with:

    • 4-5 beautiful pieces of art
    • a hymn
    • a Bible verse
    • memory work
    • poetry
    • nursery rhymes
    • and MORE!!

The front of each placemat in the set is the same, featuring the hymn, a poem, & a Bible verse.  Each back is different with various boxes of interest for kids (& adults). 

The Fall Gathering set includes: 

  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021

Get 12 Gathering Placemats when you purchase the Fall Gathering! 

$18 now $15

or get the ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR SET

Each set of Gathering Placemats includes 4 placemats with:

    • 4-5 beautiful pieces of art
    • a hymn
    • a Bible verse
    • memory work
    • poetry
    • nursery rhymes
    • and MORE!!

The front of each placemat in the set is the same, featuring the hymn, a poem, & a Bible verse.  Each back is different with various boxes of interest for kids (& adults). 

The 2021-2022 Gathering Placemat set includes: 

  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022

Get 36 Gathering Placemats when you purchase the Gathering for the 2021-2022 School Year! 

Plus: 

    • Get access to Gathering Playlists each month to bring audio to your Gathering tradition 
    • Get a monthly email with Gathering extras, extensions, and tips for making the most of your Gathering tradition

 

$54 now $36

Hours
Minutes
Seconds

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