LITTLE LEARNERS: After years of unschooling my older three children, I’m back at it with my younger two. They’re curious, imaginative and love learning! Little Learners will follow their homeschooling journey with advice, stories and what worked (and didn’t).
Homeschool Morning Routine Series
This post is part of my homeschool morning routine series.
1. Our Morning Homeschool Reading Routine.
2. Hands-on Outside Fun (coming soon)
3. Our Homeschool Morning Basket
4. Morning Binder (coming soon)
After we clean up and come in from our outside hands-on play time, we pull our our homeschool morning basket.
What is a morning basket?
A morning basket is a time when everyone (all grade levels in your homeschool) learns together about the same thing at the same time. Even though mine are only a grade apart (kindergarten and first grade), their needs and abilities are very different, and I work with them separately throughout the day. Our morning basket is a great way to learn together and work cooperatively to learn something new.
Pam Barnhill coined the term ‘morning basket’ although variations of it have been used by homeschooling families for years. I rather like the term ‘morning basket, ‘ though, as it sounds cozy. 🙂
Your morning basket will look different than mine, but remember that you want to fill it with things all your children can work on together.
Our morning basket is literally a basket although you can use any container that works for your space. We just happen to have a basket that was a perfect size for our items.
Morning Basket Ideas
Our morning basket lives on the cabinet under the TV in our living room. Here’s what’s in it –
- The little learners are currently learning about space so the materials that fit into the basket go in. We have space books, planet flash cards, a space mobile we’re working on, their space lapbooks and our Kennedy Space Center photo album.
- Morning binder. I’ll do a seperate post on this but morning binders are a place to hold reference papers, a calendar, time check and more.
- Character development: kindness. We use our morning basket time to discuss positive character traits. We’re currently exploring kindness through videos, stories and actions.
The first thing we’ll do is the Pledge of Allegiance. We have a 6′ flagpole in front of our house but most days we use the small flag that is in a plant in my kitchen window.
Next, we take out our morning binder and go through the pages. They really enjoy this! I’ll go more into detail in a seperate post.
Then we’ll choose what to do for our space study. Sometimes it involves something in the basket, other times not, Right now we’re working on finishing our space mobiles and lapbooks.
Last, we’ll discuss or do an activity related to a specific character trait. Right now it’s kindness.
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