It started, as many good things do, with Bluey. I could not have planned this if I tried. Have you seen the Bluey episode where Bingo can’t sleep and she moves around the house in a dream-like state? It’s set in an imaginary space waking dream, all set to the score of Jupiter by Gustav Holst.

One afternoon my daughter was doing her required twenty minutes of piano practice, but it was open to whatever she wanted to play. She began to play the Simple Gifts part of Appalacian Springs. Do you know it? It’s one of my favorites. She told me it was from Bluey, but she had the episode wrong, so I looked it up. The episode she was thinking of (dream-state planet episode), actually featured the song Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, and just like that, we were off.

Enter Homeschool Mom Katie: “Who wrote this song? When did he live? Wait, look at that, he actually wrote several songs for different planets! Let’s sit here at the table, girls, and listen to them. Wait, I’ll get some notecards and let’s write down how each song makes us feel and think.”

Because one of the biggest and most enriching gifts of homeschooling is this: you don’t have to stay on the path. You can follow the spark. So we did.

I pulled up The Planets by Gustav Holst, and we listened, not as background noise, but as an interactive lesson. Then I turned it into a game. “Let’s play one of these songs for your dad when he gets home and see if he can figure out which one it is from our descriptions.”

Mars felt intense.
Venus felt peaceful.
Jupiter felt big and joyful and full of life.

Somewhere in between movements, one of my kids asked:

“Wait… where’s Pluto?” Which is how a music lesson turned into a space conversation.

We talked about how Pluto used to be considered a planet, and how scientists later reclassified it. But then we went a step further, because homeschool rabbit trails rarely stop at the obvious question.

“Who named Pluto?”

Do yo know the answer? It wasn’t a famous scientist in a lab. It was an 11-year-old girl:Venetia Burney.

She suggested the name at breakfast one morning in 1930, inspired by the Roman god of the underworld. Her grandfather happened to know the right people, passed the idea along, and it stuck.

An entire planet named by a child.

Later that night, when their dad got home, we played one movement and handed him our descriptions. His job? Match the music to the words.

There was laughing.
There were wrong guesses.
There was a surprising amount of debate.

And right there at our kitchen table I could see it: This is classical education. This is the feast that Charlotte Mason spoke of. This is exposure to beauty, quesionts, and stories that connect across time. A cartoon led to music. Music led to astronomy. Astronomy led to history.
History led right back to a child sitting at a breakfast table, offering an idea that would last for generations.

I didn’t plan any of it! The Math and Language Arts still got done, but let me tell you, it felt good to add all that fine arts study in restrospect to my little homeschool day planner.