Simple Morning Time Plans
When we’re thinking about planning for our school year, it helps to do things in order:
- First, plan to teach from rest
- Next, take a bird’s eye view
- Then, choose your first things
Once we’ve done that, then we can consider what we’ll learn all together, and we can infuse our day with truth, beauty, and goodness.
School should not be utilitarian in nature (we are forming persons, after all, not just preparing the next generation of workers in the economy).
Morning Time (we often call it Symposium around here) helps us keep the true, good, and beautiful front and center, where they belong.
Morning Time places first things first- a liturgy of love. When you are trying to teach from a state of rest, a Morning Time routine helps put the emphasis on loving, going deep, and relishing rather than on getting through. It’s also a way to simplify.
Morning Time can take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours, depending on your season in life, how old your kids are, and what else your family has going on.
Right now in our house, morning time is short. I explain more about that in this podcast interview on the Your Morning Basket.
Morning Time for us looks this simple:
- We sing the doxology & a hymn
- We recite our scripture memory work all together (Sermon the Mount, currently)
- We do one other thing
The Doxology
We start our day by singing the Doxology, rather than with spoken prayer. Try this with your kids and see what happens.
I can pray while gritting my teeth, but something about raising our hands and singing about the glory of God? Changes us.
All of us.
So we start our day by singing the Doxology, and we are changed for the rest of the day because of it.
We also sing a hymn. We study one hymn every month or two- I just choose a hymn we sing at church and that I’d like my children to know, and we sing it every day until we know it. More on that in this video here. :)
Reciting our memory work
We don’t memorize an impressive amount in our homeschool. Our focus is on memorizing beautiful and formative language. That means we’re memorizing poetry and scripture, mostly– and Shakespeare, just for fun. ;)
We’re usually only memorizing one thing at a time, and it’s very low-key. I print out whatever we’re memorizing, and we all look at it and read it aloud together each day. That’s it.
I don’t test them or quiz them. I don’t insist that they know a certain amount by a certain day.
We just read it aloud together every day, and it seeps in. Right now we’re continuing what we started last year, and we’re memorizing The Sermon on the Mount. I want those words deep in my kids bones when they are older– even if they can’t rattle it off from memory a decade from now.
I want them to tuck the scriptures into their heart, and so we recite a bit of it every day. And I’m shocked at how much they memorize rather effortlessly this way.
One other thing
I told you our Morning Time/Symposium was short, right? It is. :)
The Doxology and memory work takes maybe 5-8 minutes, so now we move on to our one other thing.
We tend to do one other thing for about 15-20 minutes, and we do it every day until it’s done (rather than rotating by day, for example).
Sometimes we work through a Simply Charlotte Mason Picture Study Portfolio (I love those!)– and when we do, we’ll do it every day till it’s done. Then we move on to something else. Shakespeare, perhaps. Or mapwork. Maybe drawing. I like to fit reading aloud in here, if I can.
Whatever it is- I want it to stir our emotions and help us see beauty. That’s the criteria. One year, I rotated between faith, literature, fine art, and mapwork. We just picked something off this list and did it every day until it was done:
If you’re curious as to what that looks like in super nitty gritty form, you can listen to my podcast on Your Morning Basket or watch my video about Morning Time right here.
In that video, I show you some of the resources we’ve used for Morning Time and how I choose what to use.
Now we’re really cookin’. If I’ve thought through planning from rest, have taken a bird’s eye view, chosen the first things, and planned morning time, then I often put everything else on a loop schedule.
The posts in this series:
- Planning to Teach from Rest
- Taking a Birds’ Eye View
- First Things
- Morning Time Plans (that’s what you’re reading now)
- Loop Scheduling
- Planning is Just Guessing
I have a 17 year old son that has always been in public school. I also have 4 year old twin girls. After being blessed/cursed with”retirement” from a nursing career due to fibromyalgia, I have decided to homeschool the twins. I struggled along with my son during his schooling years. As a result, he dislikes school (unless its history) and I dread the school year.
My girls love learning and I love teaching them. Due to my unpredictable health I have been looking at loop-scheduling (and loop-I really don’t feel like cleaning my house-housekeeping ;) ). I came across your site and I will definitely be utilizing some of your ideas.
The girls are soo very different from one another. One thing in common is when they are done listening, doing, etc.; they are DONE. LOL. Loop scheduling will definitely help us.
Thank you for creating this site and sharing your knowledge. One request, could you share more information regarding teaching twins. There is little out there for us to reference. Thank you!
Allison, for excellent twin advice, we love Abbey at Surviving Our Blessings: http://www.survivingourblessings.com/
you can nab it for free doesnt work? somethings wrong with the link.
And I just discovered you today, I love all that Im reading here. God Bless.
The link is fixed now! Just scroll down to the Free Download section and click on the images.
Did y’all learn the CC timeline song last year? Did you teach all the events in the song? Do you think it was worth them learning?
Thanks! Love your blog and all your ideas!
Homeschooling mom of boys, 8 and 6 years old and a little girl who is 3 yo.
We started it last year, though we still don’t have it mastered (we keep to a much slower pace than CC communities do) ;).
We just sing it. I hang the cards in the school room (not all of them, but whichever ones pertain to our current history studies). If the kids ask questions, we flip over the card and read about it or they might go look up more info on their own. Most of the time, they don’t and we just memorize.
I do think it’s worth it– I think knowing when things happened in history is valuable– and when they run across a certain event or person in their more in-depth history studies, they can immediately place it/him on the timeline in their minds. I often hear them exclaim about learning something that we’ve been singing in the timeline song for a long while! :)
Thanks for responding! I will look more into it for next year. We are just getting on the road to classical learning. I’ve been stuck just getting by with math and literature/English because my 3 year old has a genetic syndrome. It’s been a rough and busy 3 years ;). I’m really enjoying learning from your blog. We started morning time this week and I just love it!!
Oh, and the Seeds Family Worship song Soar Like Eagles (Isaiah 40:29-31) is fabulous to turn on in the morning as you stumble out of bed and fumble with your coffeemaker:
http://www.seedsfamilyworship.com/release/power-of-encouragement-vol-5/
(it’s song #9 on this album)
Wow! So much to love in this post and in all the comments! Isaiah 40 is our first Bible memory for the coming year. Last year, we read the same chapter of Proverbs every morning at breakfast for a week at a time, and the kids told me which verse stood out to them that day. This coming year, I’m thinking we’ll read the same few psalms each morning for a week, pick one to learn to sing for the week (or month, depending on length), and try to read the entire book of Psalms before summer hits. We also read a few stories in a picture Bible, right now from the Action Bible. I’d like to work in another all-together time for scripture, liturgy, and catechism memorization, as well as some poetry, music, and art appreciation. Here’s the site I’m hoping to utilize toward the latter: http://classicalmusicnartcharlottemasonstyle.blogspot.ca/
Oh, Sarah, I’m so behind on my planning this year. I’m just now getting around to reading this. Thank you! What great plans you have for this year! I’m just now ordering Teaching the Classics. Can’t wait to watch and learn!
About the Catholic hymns …. We are using the Faith and Life series this year as part of our religion curriculum. I have the teacher manual for each grade I will have (7th, 5th, 3rd, 1st) and it has a suggested Cathilic hymn for each chapter. So that’s what we’re following. Each grade has different hymns, so I am just going with the hymns suggested in the 5th grade teacher manual. That hymn is what we will ALL be listening to and learning for that week. I am planning on finding a download of each song somewhere online (crossing fingers) and saving them all in a folder on the iPad.
I love what you’re doing! It’s so simple, but so rich. I recently wrote a post outlining what we’ve been doing during our Morning Meeting for the past few months and to finish out the year. Our time lasts for an hour to an hour and a half, but my littlest one is 4 so it’s easier to manage.
http://www.theplantedtrees.com/2014/07/morning-meeting-resources-for-2014.html
Thank you so much for sharing what you are planning for the upcoming school year. I subscribe to your blog and really enjoy the thought and insight you put into your posts. I’m a Catholic homeschooling mama to seven beautiful kiddos ages 11 down to 11 months (will be one year July 24th) and so we have a lot in common.
Thanks again!
LynAnn
I love this! Last we started a regular morning time, and it was so fruitful. Prayer was our start, then a read-aloud. This year I’m hoping to add in a few more things to our time, all depending on how it works out and fits our schedule…and the toddler’s mood! ;) Thanks for sharing all these tips and your plans.
First of all, thank you for your delightful blog! You have helped our homeschool life become more rich while becoming more simplified over the last couple years.
Our morning time this next year will look like this:
1. Morning Offering.
2. Prayer, rotating through the Gloria, Sacntus, Nicene Creed, and Lord’s Prayer in Latin. (We only do one of these each day.)
3. Each person pray for an individual request outside of our family.
4. Recite John 1:1-14
5. Family Way Verse (1 new and 1 review)
6. Read from the Loyola Saint Book for Kids
7. Alternate: Memoria Press Christian Studies 3 and Art study
8. Fairy Tale from Andrew Lang book
9. Read together one new poem and one review poem
10. CC memory work for the week.
11. Hymn
I think John 1 is what we’ll memorize for scripture next year too. :)
I love this idea – especially the binder, so pretty! I’ve never been able to work morning time well because I think our rhythm is just different but I would love to make this happen next year.
I can’t wait to come back and read through this post slowly. I am reading a sample of your book (plan on ordering it) and am enjoying it. I am still winding up some paperwork for my oldest son’s high school (he plays sports with a local school, so I have some hoops to jump through), but then plan on digging in.
Sarah,
Thank you sooooo much for posting this!! As a relatively new homeschooler looking to figure what I want our homeschool to look like I have found this post invaluable in so many ways. Love your organization. SQUILT looks fantastic! I love organization but I just don’t seem to come by in naturally, ugh. Also, I LOVED your book!! Recommended it to a few friends who fell in love with it aswell!!.
Morning time. I’ve been apparently doing this naturally at the breakfast table and had no idea that’s what it was called :). Excited to make that area of our day even more fruitful. Thanks again Sarah!
Megan
Thank you, Megan!
Bookmarking this one for future reference!
I love Psalm 8 for memory work.
We have always done morning time in some form or another. I feel like I’ve spent the past few years honing it to something that works well for our family. That being said, we have a new baby in the house and it’s likely we will have to continue to be flexible in our plans. But for now, I’m planning on sticking with the format we have been successful with over the past year.
Each month, I choose a “Virtue of the Month.” I write the definition of that virtue on a white board that lives in our family room. I then write out 2 or 3 Bible verses that relate to that virtue and these become our Bible memory work for the month. We read these together daily for a week or so and then begin challenging one another to recite it without looking at the board. By the end of the month, everyone knows the verses. We also flip through previous months’ verses for review, randomly choosing 3 or 4 to recite each day.
I also choose stories of Saints from The Book of Saints by Amy Wellborn to illustrate individuals who exemplified that particular virtue in their lives.
Aside from Bible memory work, this is the time I rotate through other memory work as well–Shakespeare, 1 or 2 poems a month from an anthology, geography, sometimes a hymn or patriotic song.
Morning time always includes a read-aloud from a devotional, Children’s Bible, etc. This is also where we do picture study once a week or so.
Some mornings we have to keep things pretty brief. Other mornings can stretch out to 45 min-1 hour. By the end of this time, my boys are usually hanging upside-down over the furniture, but amazingly they are still engaged and participating. They just don’t sit still well :)
Thanks for such detailed posts regarding your MT plans. It’s so helpful to “see” how others schedule it.
A memorization suggestion would be Genesis 1 or Romans 8. :)
Love this! I have been wanting to add a hymn to our MT, but don’t know which ones would be easy for kids (and moms). Anyone have thoughts on finding Catholic ones?
I would love to know how people choose Catholic hymns, too.
I know this is an older post, but I am skimming the comments on this very helpful series! In our morning time, we incorporate a Catholic hymn and we use this very helpful website:
http://www.catholicchant.com/
It has some English, some Latin. It has an audio file for each hymn, the voice of one man singing a capella, so you can hear his pronunciations nice and clear. We use it on my tablet to sing along. Hope this helps!
What a great resource- thank you for the link!
I love reading about everyone’s Morning Time. MT is the anchor to our day. I use to rotate subjects in our MT but it became too complicated and eventually I began to drop balls. So I try to keep it as simple as I can with older kids (15, 13, 11.) I haven’t had time to plan this year’s MT yet but with all of my thinking so far, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be simple any more.
A new facet that was introduced to our MT last year and one that I want to continue this year is notebooking a la CM. I read The Living Page in the winter and was smitten with CM’s various notebooks. So we daily rotate our notebooks during MT. We have a poetry notebook, a book of firsts, a commonplace book, a calendar of events and a nature notebook. This has started our day with the true, good and beautiful.
I like your idea of including mapping and fine arts into your MT. sigh My simple MT is starting to morph into a complicated one again.
I have The Living Page and am really excited to read it this summer!
A suggestion for a scripture memorisation- it has to be the beginning of the Gospel of St John! such poetry! It nearly always makes me cry now when I hear it, especially when it gets to the words “full of grace and truth”. These words were reserved by the Jews for God alone, only He was these things, and so St John is saying unequivocally that Jesus WAS GOD!
I can’t think of a better bit to learn by heart!
I am deep in the process of planning our morning time! It will be our first year doing a morning time, and I hope it streamlines our school and gets all the bits and pieces tucked in so they won’t be forgotten!
Here’s my plan for a 7.5, 5.5, and 2.5 yo + baby…
Calendar
Prayer
Memory Binder Review
Content Subject Read Aloud + Activity
New Memory Work
Logic of English Lesson
Cultural Literacy Read Aloud (from a rotation of 50 Famous Stories Retold, 50 Famous People, Shakespeare, Aesop, Lang…)
Content Subject will rotate by day, as will new memory work:
Monday: history
RA: SOTW
Activity: coloring page, oral narration
New MW: new spelling rule, phonogram
Tuesday: Geography
RA: FIAR picture book, history supplement book
Activity: globe work from FIAR, map work from SOTW
New MW: locations on map
Wednesday: Art
RA: Poetry
Activity: Art analysis from FIAR, Drawing Textbook lesson, Picture Study from SCM portfolios
New MW: Practical (address, phone…), grammar
Thursday: Science/Nature
RA: Science book of some kind
Activity: nature sketch, walk, or experiment
New MW: Latin root, science
Friday: Enrichment (optional)
RA: chapter book
Activity: Discuss/illustrate a literary element
New MW: Lit element
————
I know we won’t be able to add ALL that new MW each week… We will stop and sit on the new stuff until it’s memorized, then add more.
I like that you use pen and paper for your planning :). I was very much a pen and paper gal, then started using excel for weekly plans (more children and more entries needed). I tended to then overschedule, so easy with a little click. I like the process of Pen and paper better and now with fewer children actually schooling have fewer slots to put in (many more non school commitments though!!)
I was encouraged to listen to the Circe podcast by a friend who also has older children and been ‘doing this for years’. Found it a great re affirmation and encouragement to DO those things that were initial inspirations with homeschooling. So easy to drift off course, especially towards the merely functional when life is busy. So for a while reading and math in their most basic manifestation took first place.
I like the pace of your schedule, I still tend towards overscheduling on paper and then getting about half done in reality.
We are mid school year here, a good time for re assessment and refocus.
It may have been here (or maybe Facebook??). But a lady was re affirming the use of picture study, not just for its own sake in terms of cultural appreciation of beauty, but as a way of cultivating the visual memory, useful In itself as well as, as a tool for spelling and other skills needng good visual memory. So art appreciation may shift up into morning time for us!!
Poetry has this far been a great source of personal pride and sense of achievement for t our six year old, so In Terms of memory work that is where we have focused.
Adding our saints readings to our timeline has also worked well as a linking of our
I agree about it being easier to overplan when doing it digitally. We can make a lot more fit in the box just by making the font smaller. :)
Sarah!!! The Memory Work binder is a game changer!! We have done memory work for the last 3 years, but I always struggled to keep the old stuff from flying out of our brains when the new enters. :) Thank you so much for this tidbit, you can not begin to imagine how thankful I am! May the peace of the Lord be with you.
I like your morning time :) Psalm 139 is a nice chapter to memorize.
Right now my summer Morning time consists of:
Faith : Morning offering, Hail Mary. Then I sent down and read the saint of the day from Saints for Young Readers for Everyday (we love these biographical sketches that includes a short prayer/action step at the end) Then I take out my ipad and we listen to a chapter of the Bible using that awesome bible app you recommended some time back. For the fall, I plan on listening to 2 chapters: one from the old testament and one from the new. It’s great because even my younger, active boys will quietly play legos while they listen to the bible. In the fall I will loop faith reading with the bible app.
poetry: I read 2-3 selections from A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. Then I let the children pick a favorite for me to read. Beginning this fall we will start memorizing poetry together…Bernadette will pick her own and the boys will be learning nursery rhymes through classic songs like Three Little Kittens, Itsy Bitsy Spider etc.
Literature read aloud: My goal is to read 2 classics this summer. We just finished the Adventures of Pinocchio (which we LOVED!!) and we will start The Secret Garden on Monday. We’ve also gotten into the habit of an evening read-aloud. Dan and I take turns reading to either Bernadette or the 2 boys. Right now, I’m reading The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to Bernadette. I’ve decided to make bedtime stories the time to read the fun stuff. Morning time will be for History/Classic literature selections.
Shakespeare/Logic looping: We are reading Bruce Coville’s version of A Midsummer’s Night Dream and then we will listen to Jim Weiss’ version of the play and watch the scenes that are found in Ludwig’s book. We will also start memorizing Ludwig’s suggested passages…I’m super excited about this. On alternate days Bernadette and I are both sitting down to learn the informal fallacies from The Art of Argument. We’re both really liking this program and learning together.
Now for my questions:
Can anybody refer me to posts on how to memorize poetry together?
And how do y’all approach history and science? Do you have the children read text books during their own independent study? Do you only focus on reading the fiction or inspiring biographies as per Charlotte Mason’s suggestion or do you set aside time for the dry-fact reading during morning time?
I don’t do dry fact reading during morning time. We do it later (if we must, lol) or I have the children who are old enough read to the younger ones (for science, for example). I don’t really give either history or science a place in morning time unless we are needing to get it in before our Friday co-op.
You know I’ve never thought about pulling out that awesome Bible app during morning time?! That’s a great idea! :)
Would you link to that awesome app again, please, Sarah?
Of course! :) It’s this one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/truth-life-dramatized-audio/id412944964?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v3Jt
We do something similar. I call it our Living Room Liturgy – also under influence from Ordo Amoris. :) We put our breakfast dishes away, and then my daughter, husband and I gather for our daily Scripture reading and prayer, the day’s entry in the American Patriot’s Almanac, our nature reading, and other readings that lend themselves to a group setting. I was reluctant initially to include Beautiful Girlhood (Hale/Andreola) in our morning time for fear my husband would be put off, but he appreciates hearing these chapters on lady-like character development and sometimes has a helpful comment. We finish up with recitation before heading off to the Dining Room for Latin. This past year we memorized Isaiah 40 (there are several familiar sections in that chapter). This year I plan for us to memorize Romans 8, and possibly 12. I would love to memorize John 1:1-14 in Latin. We’ll see. :)
Living Room Liturgy! Love!
Two others mentioned Romans 8 and 12. Guess I’ll go give myself a refresher and choose one. :)
My morning time is so similar to yours I had to laugh. We have many of the same influences :)
We start with prayer (Trisagion prayer and nicene creed)
Morning meeting (what’s going on that day)
Memory work (we have our daily work until its memorized, then it gets moved to weekly {7 spots} then monthly {30 spots} so we are reciting three things each day). Our memory work is a hodgepodge of common knowledge (home adress, months of the year), math (skip counting, facts), poetry, scripture, geography (continents and oceans), science (planets, bones) and literally anything else that comes up as useful. All in context to something we are studying, of course ;)
Read aloud (one poem and one chapter, alternating history based selections and just plain good selections)
And “one more thing” a rotation of geography (the globe, the oceans, and one continent each month), Aesop (read, narrate, discuss), fine arts (the orchestra and major conposers, then switch to art halfway through the year) and saints (one each week). But much like you, we don’t always get to this part in the morning. Toddlers.
Oh gosh- our morning times ARE similar. So do you choose your own memory work? I like the common knowledge element- I’m always surprised to find out that my kids don’t know something basic like our home address or our president’s name or whatever. :)
Yes, so far I’m just adding in memory work as I realize it would be good to memorize something. I keep a list of ideas :). We are still newbies, though, going into our second year. My boys are only 5 and 6 (plus the soon to be 2 yo).
Hi Sarah, You asked for a recommendation of a Bible chapter for memorization. Totally out of the blue, but I recommend Romans 12. It is totally speaking to ME right now and I’d love for my children to memorize it. Anyway!
Peace,
Meg
Oooo the Squilt link looks really intriguing. I like the price! Have you used it before? I’m wondering how long you would spend on each lesson, so how long would each volume last you (half year, whole year?) hmmm…I’m also wondering where you go from there…for instance so we listen to the piece, chat about it using the ebook prompts and then do a notebooking page and then are we done or where could we keep going? hmmmm…pondering pondering…thanks for the good food for thought!
No, I haven’t used Squilt before- it’s new to us this year, though it looks really promising! What I like especially is that Mary (the author) says it’s all you need- all the links are right there in the ebook, so I don’t have to go find the music or relevant videos or whatever. I’m not sure how long we’ll spend on each lesson- we’ll have to give it a whirl to find out. :)
We use SQUILT and we love it. It is so easy to use. We are starting the second volume this year.
What a timely post! We have been discussing Morning Time over on the SCM forum here: http://simplycharlottemason.com/scmforum/topic/morning-basket-lets-discuss
For us, we’ve not had a morning basket. We have had morning devotional where we do several things as a family:
◦Sing hymns (learning a new hymn every month or so, practicing old ones)
◦Read scriptures together (a few verse per person, littles get help repeating on their turn)
◦Discuss what we read, sometimes act it out, talk about what we would have done/felt, etc.
◦Sometimes we read articles from church magazines, watch the short Bible videos free online to discuss, etc.
◦Scripture memory together.
What I see changing this year is that we’ll expand the morning basket to include other subjects, and it will bleed into our family study (World Geography and Cultures, find my multilevel plan here: http://ourbusyhomeschool.com/world-geography-and-cultures-multilevel-plan/
Individual work will wait until later in the morning this year. I’m working with eight children, ages 1 to 13, so it’s always fun and full.
Also, we’re reading The Whipping Boy right now over lunch or dinner each day and it’s been a great read! The kids are seeing in blatant, overblown ways how Prince Brat is selfish and hurts those around him. It’s caused some good discussion and a bit of good-natured teasing through the day when someone is less than kind.
I’ve never read The Whipping Boy but I’m really looking forward to it!