A few years ago I shared with you about our Morning Basket. At that time my kids were 3 and 8, so it looked a little different than it does now. During those three years we've tried variations on our original routine because as you know if you've been homeschooling for at least a year, every year is a new game. Now that my kids are 6 and 11 and our outside obligations have changed, our Morning Basket focus has changed, too.
Living Books: Because we follow the Charlotte Mason method as much as we can, living books are very important in our homeschool. Unfortunately, with lots of other responsibilities competing for our time, we don't always get to living books in some subject areas as much as I would like to. Sure, it's no problem when we're looking at literature selections, but when was the last time you used a living book for math? For us, that has not been nearly as common as my son has gotten older, so the Morning Basket time has been a great way to remedy that. He still has his regular textbook math assignment (we do Saxon three days a week and Life of Fred the other two…so really, I guess he is getting more living book math exposure than I was realizing…), but we use the basket to explore the lives of mathematicians and the history of math, too. Over the next few weeks I've share some of the specific resources I've found with you for the different content areas!
Review: Now that my kids are older, we're involved in more outside activities than we have been in the past. Most of these activities have been good for my kids, but some of them also require some extra practice and review at home, too. We're using our Morning Basket time to revisit and sometimes expand on topics from our co-op such as Shakespeare, Spanish and hymn study.
These two areas are our main focus with our Morning Basket right now, but that may change as the year goes on! Right now I like what we're doing because we're covering enough different content that if that's the only "school" thing we get to on a crazy day, we've still covered quite a bit. Also, on some days we don't actually do the Morning Basket in the morning, so do what you need to make it work for you!
If you're interested in learning more about Morning Baskets, you might want to check out these resources:
Your Morning Basket Podcast: Pam Barnhill's new podcast has been a lot of fun to listen to and has really gotten me motivated to get back to this great routine. There's lots of good food for thought here!
Fostering Collaboration with Morning Meeting Time: Do you have older kids? Check out how Heather uses morning time to bring her kids (5th through 12th grade) together each day!
If you've been using a Morning Basket, please share what's worked for you in the comments so we can all learn from each other.