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Morning Basket – Let's Discuss!
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A morning basket was mentioned in another thread and instead of hijacking that thread even further I figured we could start a new one! So have at it! Do you have a morning basket? What is in it ? Are you planning to have one?
If you’ve never heard of morning baskets you can see Christie’s here. I have always loved the posts at Wildflowers and Marbles on the morning basket so here are links to some of those: One here, another here, and a third here.
Discuss away!
We love our Morning Basket. It has simplified our Bible, Scripture memor,y and family read aloud times by putting these three items in a predictible “package”. The kids love that there is a beginning, middle and end that they can count on every day.
The basket is portable too so we often take it on the deck when we have breakfast outside. DH can easily lead our Morning Basket time if I am away since the contents area always ready inside.
More info on ours here:
https://brighthope4tomorrow.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/the-morning-basket/
My kids are 9,7,5. We just started using a morning basket a few weeks ago, in part because of some of the threads and posts you mentioned. We were doing all of our school immediately after lunch, when the various preschoolers in my dayhome were napping. It was getting to feel like we were rushing through, just ‘getting it done’, though, so I wanted to move some things to the morning. We only have one baby, now, and my oldest is more indeoendent, so we want to move everything to the mornings eventually.
One reason the basket idea works is that most of our school materials are in the basement family room. The basket has everthing we want to do before we move downstairs. My kids wake at different times and take varying lengths of time to get moving in the morning. With the morning materials all ready to go, I can just call everyone together when I’m ready (baby fed, diapers all clean, etc.) Dressed or breakfasted or not, everyone stops and comes to participate. Then they can go back to the morning routine, finishing chores, instrument practice, and personal scripture time.
We do: prayer/hymn, gospel study, Spanish song and sequences, family nature observation calendar (they tell me something they noticed in the past day), Scripture box, Science reading, and if their attention is still there, a fun family read aloud. (Otherwise we move the read aloud to lunch time.) We also rotate through LDTR for Children, art, picture study, and composer study, although the art project usually waits until after the rest of the morning routine is done.
Joanne
Oh good!! I’ve been trying to get my mind around what I’d like to have in mine when we start “scheduled” school again in a couple of weeks. Then I hope to make it the cornerstone of the day…and do it always “school” or “no school”. I’m actually trying to get away from even thinking that way (school or no school). I’m thinking we may have a noon basket too.
Evidently we do a morning basket and I didn’t even realize it : ).
We do ours while the kids eat breakfast (that way mouths are closed and littles are busy : ). I read Bible to them and we discuss/narrate. Then I do a read aloud – this is the only time I have all 8 in one spot (my oldest will be in college in the fall although he will be living here) so we pick something that’s good for everyone. Then, this year, we’ll go back to doing Scripture Memory then too. We used to do memory then a couple years ago but did it more individually last year. It didn’t work as well so back to morning time it is.
We do an afternoon loop for the other family stuff (oldest may or may not be there). We loop through Shakespeare, poetry, picture study, music study, hymn study, laying down the rails for Children and maybe something else but I don’t remember right now. Since these don’t happen everyday (we try but it doesn’t always happen), they are on a loop rather than scheduled for a specific day of the week. These happen during afternoon snack time.
Rebecca
I’m loving reading these responses!
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). Individual work will wait until later in the morning this year.
This will be our first year (next week) implementing our morning basket. I saw it last year on the Wildflowers and Marbles blog and knew it would be a great fit for us. We’ll do Bible, memory work, history, character, science, Spanish, poetry, hymn, and geography.
And we’re adding a twist to our family night! I want my dh to experience some things with us so we’ll choose a few things for family night from this list: picture study, family book of centuries, math game or read-aloud, reading game….all while our composer study music plays in the background.
We’ll see how it goes!
Yes, Tristan, chores and snack are after morning basket and then we move into the school room for some sit-down work.
We’ll do chores before morning basket (right after breakfast) and I imagine by the time we finish geography it will be snack time. We’re very predictable here and I like it that way.
We call it “lunch boxes” because we do “morning basket” at lunch time. I tried to vary what we do every day and cover a lot of “living ideas” during this time. Here is my recent post about ours. http://pupsplanesprogeny.blogspot.com
Our “morning basket” is used in the morning and at lunch . Plus, it is not really a basket. It is a rolling cart that I got from IKEA.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20271892/
It makes it easy this way to go from room to room with all the things I need for the morning (in the school room) and at noon (in the kitchen). It includes:
Scripture Memory
Bible
Poetry
Picture Study Portfolio
History Read Aloud
Science Read Aloud
Literature Read Aloud
Tristan what a great thread !
In our morning basket we have our literature read aloud , a history read aloud , Bible , scripture memory box, personal development / character building book, prayer sticks , memory work , Tae Kwan Do “practice at home sheets” for technique – we usually end with this as it gets the wiggles out before transitioning into things like math.
This year we will be adding Hymn study to our morning basket. Looking forward to fitting this into our morning routine. 🙂
Such a fun thread ! Thanks ladies.
Jamie
What a great thread!
At this moment our “morning basket” is merely a read aloud that we do after our mid-morning meal (we have a tiny breakfast early in the morning, and then a more substantial brunch-type meal around 10:30 every day). Lately, after our meal, it’s been literature, but sometimes it’s history or science. We do the bulk of our school day downstairs where our schoolroom is set up, but doing this one subject upstairs and immediately after a meal usually means everyone is happy and at decent attention and it brings in some variety on our location.
My challenge with increasing it to the true “morning basket” idea (with MORE ideas/subjects) mentioned above is TIME. It seems when we finish our one reading, the attention span is falling and my people are eager to move on. Perhaps we’re spending too much time on the one reading (I’d say we read for a good 12-15 minutes).
Could I get a sense of how long “morning basket” is for most people? Do you all stay in your morning basket spot for a good hour? I am open to changing things up!
Angie
Angelina, what about varying the part of the brain used? So do your reading aloud, the do something like singing a hymn you are study, then scripture memory(speaking), then Picture study occasionally (looking and narrating), and then you could go back to a read aloud.
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