When I first heard of Morning Baskets or Morning Time, I fell in love with the idea. As a new homeschool mom to a kindergartner, I felt a bit intimidated with the idea of sitting down and working topics into our homeschool like poetry, art study, hymns and other subjects that aren’t the main subjects like math, reading, grammar and spelling. This negative thought probably rooted from not having the experience myself in these subjects through public school. In fact, music and art classes were those subjects that just weren’t “necessary”. Now that I am home with my children, I see that music and art are such a big part of their day. Through repetition, they began to learn the ABC’s from songs. Through art, they master fine motor skills and explore the world of creativity and color. Music, art, and rich literature are huge parts of my children’s natural lives without even forcing it. They just genuinely love those subjects.
With a spark of inspiration, I was determined to give it a try and see what rhythm we can create during homeschool morning time. Taking a gentle approach to morning time has been the biggest help in creating a rhythm. Bible readings, poetry memorization, rich music and art, weaves our studies together, making real-life connections to learning and life. Below are the how’s and why’s we do our morning time subjects. If you’re following me on Instagram, you probably saw a similar list already in a post from last week. This post goes a little deeper in each subject and I’ve linked as many resources as I could in this blog post so you can find them yourself more easily!
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Bible deovtional and prayer
We start our morning by reading our Bible devotional and praying for our day, and loved ones. The Bible devotionals we use are fairly short, one page readings so it has kept my kindergartner engaged during the 5 minute readings. I will often ask my kindergartner to tell me what her favorite part was, or ask her to narrate back what she heard in summary. Usually she responds with a simple phrase such as “God protects me always”. We are currently loving this Bible devotional here!
Scripture Copywork
To further our Bible readings, my daughter is also memorizing scripture which I personally picked out and use in this copywork notebook here. Kids this age are amazing at memorization and I want my children to memorize things that are good and true next to their educational topics. What better place to start than the Bible? Each week we begin a new scripture. I will say it a couple times and then have my kindergartner say it with me a couple times. Then she will trace the scripture in her notebook. We repeat this process for the week and by the end of the week (sometimes even earlier), she has it memorized and can tell me without help.
Copywork has become a favorite tool I use often for not just narration and grasping concepts, but also writing practice and sentence structure. When we use copywork for Bible memorization, there are also heart-full conversations about what the verse means to us and how we should apply it in our daily lives. My kindergartner loves to make these connections and it has become some of the best conversations in our entire morning.
Hymns
We are always listening to worship music and classical music in the background of our day because it’s beautiful, we enjoy it, and I simply just don’t like having the TV on as background noise. When we come to sit down and listen to a hymn, we listen to it a couple times, memorize the lyrics through repetition each month, and that’s the most of our hymn time. I think it’s lovely to introduce songs and hymns we are not familiar with. I love getting our monthly hymns for free from happyhymnody.com. Most hymns are older and although I can remember some from my childhood, I am also introduced to a lot of new hymns which have been fun learning new ones alongside my kindergartner! Songs often come to me in a time when I am in prayer, when I don’t have the words to say what I want to say. When we sing our hymns, I am singing to the Lord, not to just learn a new hymn or checking something off my checklist (I love checklists!). For my kindergartner, it is purely enjoyment right now, and that’s exactly what I want it to be. We enjoy good, worshipful music together in our day and I want worship to become a heart habit and daily posture together.
Poetry
Poetry is a beautiful art of words and is a means to open the mind and extend wisdom and beauty to the reader. Poetry introduces us to new vocabulary, and it helps us discover nature, character and objects more deeply. Sometimes I will just read a poem a day for the week, other times we will slow things down and memorize a poem for an entire week. My kindergartner likes to illustrate the poems we read about as well and I love seeing her interpretation of our poems in painting or drawing form, as simple as they are. Some of our favorite poetry books are listed here.
Monthly Weather Wheels
Something new we’ve incorporated just this month into our morning time is weather observation. My kids eagerly look outside, pointing out the color of the sky, if it’s windy, sunny, cloudy or rainy and then we gather back at the table and paint our weather wheel. It will be interesting to see the weather wheel completed and notice what type of weather we had the most in that particular month. Here is our current progress for January 2021 in AZ.
I wanted to include this in our morning time because it is helpful for our children to notice their surroundings, especially in nature. We’ve attempted nature journals early in our kindergarten curriculum, but soon discovered it wasn’t for us, at least right now. The monthly weather wheels have given us a more gentler approach to documenting our outside surroundings, and I hope to expand our wheels with other elements of nature and seasons as my children age and begin to take in more details. Especially in the months we are camping in the mountains!
Morning Menus
We use a restaurant menu to hold all of the sheets that would normally need to be laminated, so we can use them over and over again! I love the menu idea because I can switch out the sheets when needed and they work great with dry erase markers!
In our morning menus we have our home helper chore sheet, the monthly hymn lyrics we’re singing, clockwork and days of the week practice sheets, sight word writing sheet, and a reflection journal page for my daughter to illustrate and write what she’s thankful for and who or what she wants to prayer for that day. Our morning menu serves mostly the purpose of getting in extra handwriting practice, and some life skills like learning to read a clock and knowing the date and day. Aside from our monthly hymn lyrics from happyhymnody.com, all the morning menu sheets we use can be found in my shop here as a digital download!
Morning time has been a great way to transition into formal lessons, with still weaving in subjects that are important for us to have in our day. It is a gentler approach to starting our homeschool day, instead of just jumping right into math or reading.
Each day looks a little different, but on most days we start morning time around 8:30 and are done before 9am. I don’t wait too long after to begin our formal lessons, so my kindergartner is still school-focused. My kindergartner can do parts of her morning time independently such as our morning menu, and that gives me a chance to finish my coffee, finish breakfast with my toddler, and finish the rest of my own bible devotional if I didn’t finish before my kids woke up.
I’m excited to see how morning time continues to adapt with each season and grade level, but also when my toddler is ready to join us! I’ll be sure to share more when the time comes!
