If you’ve been around the homeschool world, you may have heard the term ‘Morning Time’. Simply put, morning time is a time in a homeschool day where familys share in read alouds, recitations, poetry, artist and composer studies, Bible reading, and singing songs. It’s a time to come together, no matter if it happens in the mornings or not, and take part in subjects that might often get pushed to the wayside. My family has been incorporating morning time, or morning collective as we call it here, for the last 3 years. You can read about our previous morning collective plans here, and last year’s December Morning Collective here.
In this blog article I wanted to share with you some simple, low key, and mostly free things we will be including in our 2022 Advent Morning Collective and invite you and your family to join us this Advent/December!
WHEN WILL WE START?
Advent begins on November 27th of this year, so we will begin our advent morning collective the next day on Monday. If you want to follow along, I’ll be sharing glimpses in my Instagram stories often and I will save to an Advent highlight bubble on my Instagram profile for you to check out later if you miss any of it! Feel free to join in at anytime in December though!
WILL YOU ALSO CONTINUE YOUR CURRENT MORNING COLLECTIVE PLANS?
No. We will pause our usual morning collective material and replace it with our advent resources until the New Year. I really love that we can bring in material for our children that celebrates our family’s beliefs, freely, and take time in our typical homeschool rhythm to reflect on why we have this great hope and joy in every part of our lives!
So while we aren’t doing “Christmas School” or any formal Advent study in our homeschool at this time, we will make room for a collective of resources to include Advent in our time together. We are going to continue on with our normal school schedule following Ambleside Online’s Year 2 Term 2 reading schedule through December.
Morning collective is the first thing we do before any formal lessons, as it helps bring each of us into a posture of attention, and discipline for our day. Morning collective, for my family, is full of truth, beauty and goodness of our Charlotte Mason inspired education and having these at the front of our schedule has worked well for us, though that isn’t the case for all families.
My hope in sharing our Advent Morning Collective plans is to show you the great freedom that we get to include rich resources in our homeschool without too much effort on our parts. Most of the resources I share below are available to download for free if you choose to follow along with our morning collective plans. We’d love to have you and your family join in!
Now, without further ado, here’s our 2022 Advent Morning Collective:
Advent Read Aloud
All Creation Waits by Gayle Boss is a 25 day devotional-style read aloud where you and your family reflect on how wild animals adapt when cold and darkness descend. This read aloud will invites us to discover the gifts of winter, learning the rhyhtms and mysteries of creatures big and small, during the Advent season.
Every morning, while I read aloud, I’ll have my children (ages 4 and 7) color a picture of each creature which I happened to find for free. I might also quickly google and pull up a real-life picture of the creature on my laptop for them to see and help color more accurately. Want these free companion coloring pages to this Advent book? Just click on each link for each day’s creature. You can find this book on Amazon.
- Advent 1 – Painted Turtle
- Advent 2- Muskrat
- Advent 3- Black Bear
- Advent 4- Chickadee
- Advent 5- Whitetail Deer
- Advent 6- Honey Bee
- Advent 7- Chipmunk
- Advent 8- Cottontail
- Advent 9- Common Loon
- Advent 10- Wood Frog
- Advent 11- Raccoon
- Advent 12- Little Brown Bat
- Advent 13- Opossum
- Advent 14- Wild Turkey
- Advent 15- Common Garter Snake
- Advent 16- Woodchuck
- Advent 17- Striped Skunk
- Advent 18- Porcupine
- Advent 19- Common Eastern Firefly
- Advent 20- Meadow Vole
- Advent 21- Eastern Fox Squirrel
- Advent 22- Red Fox
- Advent 23- Northern Cardinal
- Advent 24- Lake Trout
- Advent 25- Jesus, the Christ
Carols and Songs
We’ll be replacing our Ambleside Online’s monthly Hymn for Christmas carols and songs! We will sing 5 total, one for every week in Advent. Memorzing isn’t required, although I wouldn’t be surprised if my children learn a line or two by heart from each song by the end of every week. I picked 5 from Ambleside Online’s list of Christmas Carols and decided to add the lyrics to our morning menu to easily sing along with. You can download all 5 morning menu printables for free here!
While I love traditional Christmas songs, I also have found a few modern ones that we’ll enjoy listening to in the background during our weeks. Feel free to take a listen to them!
- Heaven Has Come to Us by Sovereign Grace Music
- O Come, All You Unfaithful by Sovereign Grace Music
- Mary Did You Know? Carrie Underwood version
Poetry
I selected This is Christmas Morning by Edwin Waugh (1817-1890) as our poem for Advent. My intent is to read the poem aloud each morning and then slowly work on memorizing and reciting each line with my children. I’m not sure how far we will get at memorizing this poetry piece, but the words are absolutely a delight to read regardless! You can download a morning menu printable of this poem for free here!
Names of Jesus Advent Calendar Cards
These printable cards are in my shop and we’ll be displaying them in the main room of our home. The Advent calendar cards are such a simple way to memorize scripture together while learning the beautiful names of Jesus that we find throughout the Bible! We plan to hang and use these cards each morning, revealing a name for Jesus and reading the scripture together, counting down to Christmas!
Artwork Admiration
I love displaying seasonal artwork throughout our home and Christmas art is probably a personal favorite. This year I decided to display works of art that demonstrates parts of the Gospel story from a select few artists. I plan to print, laminate and hang in our homeschool nook. We’ll take a look at an artwork, one per week in December, and at the end of the week we’ll attempt to replicate with whichever art supplies we’d like. I’m such a visual learner and I know atleast one of my kids are too. Telling the Gospel story through works of art is just another beautiful tool we can use in our home this season! You can download the artworks we’ll be looking at and admiring for free here! They are half page display cards, but you can certainly put them in a morning menu.
Family Advent Activities
While this resource might happen in the evenings, I wanted to include it here for you as another free Advent idea! Instead of an advent calendar that usually includes a tiny toy, candy or trinket the children open daily, counting down to Christmas, I decided to make this in it’s place! This is our family tradition of presence over presents. I’ve made a free download printable of the activities we plan to do together this season, and you can grab your family advent activities printable here! Print and cut to store in your own advent calendar or store in a little basket near the Christmas tree and pull from it each day. There are also blank spots for you to add your own family activities!
And there you have it! Our 2022 Advent Morning Collective plans! I hope some or all of these resources are useful for you this season! If you happen to join us with any of these plans, I hope you’ll share with me on Instagram! Just tag @ourcoopernest and use the hashtag #ourcoopernest🙂
Looking for something a little more formal for your Christmas homeschool? You might enjoy one of these wholesome, Christ-centered resources from other homeschool mamas:
Delightfully Feasting’s Yuleschool
Brighter Day Press’s Advent Guide
A Humble Place’s Advent Art Devotions
Peaceful Press Unearthing Wonder Advent Guide
Driven By Grace’s The Savior Was Born Study
Merry Christmas, friends!
