We have done a Morning Basket for a few years. Basically it is a time where the family is gathered together for a devotional or studies that begin your day with truth, goodness, and beauty. The contents of this morning time are as varied as individual families are. I have a mix of ages from high school down to a baby. We also incorporate a loop schedule into our basket.
Every day we begin this way:
- Sing a hymn together.
- Pray
- Read a devotional - this year we'll read the day's entry in Stand a Little Taller by Gordon B. Hinkley. It has a scripture to read and a quote. We'll discuss this.
- Article of Faith memory work
- 50 States - We are learning the shape, name, and capital of each state this year. Some of my children may already be familiar with these, but we're doing it together. Daily we will look at a couple pages about ONE state. We may take 2 days per state sometimes, I don't really care how quickly we go through this. We will be going in alphabetical order. The picture books I've got in my basket for this currently are Celebrate the 50 States by Loreen Leedy, The United States of America: A State-by-State Guide by Millie Miller and Cyndi Nelson, and Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America by Lynne Cheney.
After these four daily tasks we move into the looped portion of our morning basket. Each day we will do 1-2 things from our loop, picking up where we left off the last time. I am still deciding the actual order for our loop items but here they are:
- Bedtime Math - It's a great website, a free app, or daily emails. We'll use the app for our Morning Basket. Each day there are three or more math problems for a variety of abilities from the very young to better mathematicians than I happen to be. It includes a day's topic with information about interesting things, the problems, and the answers, which you can't see until you click on a specific button.
- Picture Study - We are starting with the art of Bev Doolittle using the book The Art of Bev Doolittle. It's got the story of her art as well, so we will be able to read and learn more about her along the way. After a couple months we will move to a new artist. On tap this year we also have Beatrix Potter and John James Audubon.
- Poetry Study - We are reading a few poems each time from one of our poetry books. The first two poetry books in my basket this year are A Child's First Book of Poems illustrated by Cyndy Szekeres and The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry selected and with commentary by Louis Untermeyer, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund. We also read poetry during Poetry Tea Time every other week or so.
- Civics Study - We'll be reading from The Land of Fair Play (2nd edition from Christian Liberty Press).
- Ohio History Stories - We'll read from Critters, Flitters, and Spitters: 24 Amazing Ohio Animal Tales by Rick Sowash and Heroes of Ohio: 23 True Tales of Courage and Character, also by Rick Sowash.
- Grammar Fun - We'll do Mad Libs, look at the World of Language series by Ruth Heller, read Punctuation Tales, etc. Did you know they have really fun Mad Libs themed books like Star Wars and Doctor Who? Yep, my kids will be thrilled!
Did you miss any posts in this series?
We're doing States this year too. :) I'm reading Teaching From Rest and have read about Morning Basket/Loop Scheduling on The Unplugged Family. I have been thinking about adding a few elements to our family learning time to see how it goes. I love the idea of it!
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