Morning Time has become a beautiful anchor of our day over the last few years. With a busy toddler in the mix, it’s not always peaceful and exactly how my idealistic mind has it all laid out, but it is beautiful nonetheless. When my children were preschoolers, we called it “Together Time”. You can read about what it looked like in those earlier years in this blog post.

In short, Morning Time is a coming together of all the children in a home education setting, enjoying subjects that span across a wide age range. Morning Time can look different from one family to another, but the bottomline is that it includes the subjects that everyone can do together. These materials emphasize truth, goodness, and beauty. I have explained in detail what that includes for us below.

In the morning, after nursing the toddler and getting everyone dressed for the day, we bring our breakfast to the table for Morning Time. I also bring our basket of Morning Time materials and give each child their Morning Time menu.

A Morning Time Menu is essentially a book of transparent pages into which you can slip papers for your child to look at, read, or even write on using a dry erase marker. I bought three of these (one for each child and one for myself), and I set them up at the beginning of each week. We use the 4-page menus which means I can insert eight pages at a time. I purchased mine here.

Here are the elements we currently include in our Morning Time with children ages 5 and 6 and a half. 

Prayer and Devotions

The first thing we do is pray and thank God for our day and ask Him to come and be present in all we do. While they eat their breakfast I read from our current devotional book. They often ask questions and we discuss what I read. Sometimes they practice looking up scripture from what we have read in their children’s Bible. Recently we have also been memorizing some attributes of God using these cards from Tiny Theologians. Sometimes we add in a hymn or worship song to this time and sing together. We often pray together again, specific to what we learned in our time studying His word. Here are some of the resources I pull from:

• Leading Little Ones To God – This is the devotional book we have been using for the last year. I often tweak some of the wording to make it more palatable for little minds, but it has been full of rich theological ideas and doesn’t sugar-coat the truth, which is important to me. I love that there is a hymn and discussion questions at the end of each reading.
• Tiny Theologians Attributes of God Cards – Each Morning Time I add a card. I read the description and verse and we discuss what it means. The kids like to create a hand motion for each attribute to help them remember it. We recite all of the attributes we have learned so far. We are almost finished with these cards and I plan to begin the Names of God cards next.
• Adventure Children’s Bible – This is the Bible my son uses to read and practice looking up Scripture.

Calendar Work and Weather Charting

When the kids finish eating breakfast, they are ready to do their calendar work and weather charting. They love this part because it is so interactive. I’ve wanted to incorporate calendar and weather into our Morning Time for so long, but I could never find exactly what I was looking for. Finally, I decided to make my own Daily Weather Chart and Traceable Monthly Calendar. Using dry erase markers, my kids trace the month name and all of the numbers leading up to the day’s date. Then they circle the date. I write the full date on our chalkboard and we read it aloud together. Then they feel or look outside to observe the weather and chart it on their weather page. If you don’t have a morning menu, these pages work great in dry erase pouches or laminated. You can download both charts here.

Character Study and Scripture Recitation

The main curriculum we are using this year is A Year of Tales. One of the reasons I chose A Year of Tales is because she offers full and rich Morning Time selections that correlate with the Beatrix Potter tale we are reading that week. Included in the curriculum is a character trait to study and a scripture to ponder and memorize. Each of these is a page in our menu. We read them, discuss different elements of them each day, and practice reciting the scripture.

Poetry Reading and Recitation

The next pocket of our menu has selections of lovely poetry slipped into it. I get our poetry from two main sources – A Year of Tales and Exploring Nature With Children. I simply read the poem each day to the children and we discuss it. After a few days of reading it, they naturally start to memorize it and we practice recitation. Sometimes we also recite poems from previous weeks as well. We study each poem for 1-2 weeks.

Art Study and Expression

Next we observe a piece of art, which I also pull from A Year of Tales and Exploring Nature With Children. Sometimes we simply observe the artwork and discuss what we see and feel from it. Sometimes the kids enjoy giving the scene an imaginative story and sharing it with us. Other times we get out our watercolors, colored pencils, or crayons and attempt to replicate the art. You can find the art supplies we use for this here.

Read Alouds

Lastly, I read our weekly Beatrix Potter tale and 2 or 3 books aloud from our book basket. The books in our book basket are usually themed according to what we are studying that week. I choose them based on the book lists in A Year of Tales and Exploring Nature With Children. Other times they aren’t themed to anything specific, they are just lovely, rich stories from one of the other book lists I follow. You can read this post about how I choose good quality books!

Our entire Morning Time usually lasts about an hour. Then we break for more play, chores, and outside time before jumping into short individual lessons for each child. It has been such a life-giving way to bring us together at the beginning of each day. I hope this was a helpful post as you plan your days. 

One of the reasons I choose to homeschool is to give our children the time and space to study the natural world around them. Rather than simply looking at pictures in a book, they are able to experience the world for themselves. Nature study is an essential part of a Charlotte Mason home education. I love this article from Simply Charlotte Mason about its importance.

When I began learning about the importance of nature study, I felt lost on where and how to begin. I wasn’t sure how to teach it – especially since I am not incredibly knowledgeable about nature subjects myself. Then I found Exploring Nature with Children!

Exploring Nature with Children is truly one of a kind. It is a year-round nature study manual that dives in week-by-week into different topics, according to the months and seasons. Everything you need to teach your students about the natural world around them is offered in this gorgeous guide. Topics like the plant life cycle, weather, evergreens, and the moon are all covered in Exploring Nature with Children.

Each week offers:

• Easy to understand information about each subject for the teacher to learn before teaching. They also include relevant pages to read in The Handbook of Nature Study to better prepare yourself for the lesson
• A nature walk & nature journal activity
• A picture book list for additional reading about the topic
• A selection of poetry that ties in with the theme of the week
• A piece of artwork that correlates with the topic of study, along with questions to prompt discussion
• Extensions activities such as crafts, writing ideas, and music appreciation

One of the best parts about this curriculum is that it isn’t age-specific. Lynn Seddon, the author, wrote this guide in a way that can easily be adapted to the youngest or the oldest of nature learners. We have dabbled in it up until now, but this school year I will be diving in head-first with it, and I am just so excited! I look forward to many, many years of using Exploring Nature with Children in our home education, beginning this Autumn. I hope you will join us!

Follow Lynn on Instagram @raisinglittleshoots and see how others are using Exploring Nature with Children. You can purchase the full curriculum here.

A couple of years ago, I started homeschooling my two young children (then ages 2 and 3 and a half). I hesitate to even say we have been homeschooling up to this point because it has been very unstructured and casual. To them, it has pretty much all been considered play, but to me there has been a lot of intention behind what we do. We have loosely been through The Peaceful Preschool curriculum twice, adding in things along the way that followed the kids’ interests. Most recently, we went through The Peaceful Press’ Christmas Guide and absolutely loved it!

With that being said, as the months have gone on and my children have gotten older, I have tried to increase the structure to prepare us all for elementary schooling to begin. Now that the kids are 4 and 5 and a half years old, we are gearing up to start kindergarten in January. If my son were enrolled in school, he would’ve began last Fall, but with the arrival of our newest baby in August and the holidays, we decided January would be a perfect start time. Before the baby arrived, I started researching what we would do for kindergarten and have come up with a plan I wanted to share with you all. As much as I love The Peaceful Preschool and it has served us well, it is time to move on to something else. I am looking forward to exploring The Playful Pioneers and The Precious People when they are a little older.

Although my daughter is younger than kindergarten age, my plan is to teach them together and to adapt activities to her skill level along the way. She is always welcome to join in our lessons, but not required to. Up to this point they love to be together, and she is usually very interested in learning everything he is. I try to keep a few hands-on activities (such as lacing or playdough) near the table when we do school for her to grab and use if I need to work one-on-one with him.

After much research, I have decided to use a combination of Before Five in a Row and Five in a Row for our kindergarten year. If you haven’t heard of this curriculum, it is based completely around literature, which is what drew me to it in the first place. The concept is that you read each book five days in a row, and each day you focus on a different subject that you can glean from the story. For example, one week we will be rowing the book “The Story About Ping”, the story of a duckling who gets separated from his family. After reading the book, we may study the Yangtze River, which is where the story takes place, for geography. The next day after reading, we may do a science lesson on the natural habitat of ducks. The third day, we may count all of the ducks, create a family tree of the ducks, and then make one of our own family. You get the idea. I anticipate that using this curriculum will open my eyes that every book is an opportunity to explore and learn more in every subject. I hope it does the same for my kids.

Before Five in a Row (BFIAR) is the preschool version of the curriculum. After looking over the book lists I decided to ease us in with some of the familiar books from BFIAR such as The Snowy Day, Blueberries For Sal, and We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and then move into the unfamiliar and more advanced stories found in Five in a Row (FIAR). I am using the guides Before Five in a Row: A Treasury of Creative Ideas to Inspire Learning Readiness and Five in a Row: Volume I as my foundation. I will build off of them using Pinterest, blogs, and ideas I drum up based on what I think my kids would love to learn. I can’t wait to share all of what we are doing and learning through these stories!

In addition to this, we will also be starting our day with Bible and adding in short lessons in math, phonics, and handwriting. Here is what we are using for each of these areas:

Bible: Leading Little Ones to God and Scripture Memory

Math: The Good and The Beautiful Kindergarten Math

Phonics: Explode the Code

Handwriting: Handwriting Without Tears Kindergarten

I also plan to begin sign language lessons this year! I will be using the Signing Time K-3 Classroom Curriculum. You can find it and more resources for learning sign language here. I plan to do it with the kids a couple times a week.

A lot of exciting changes are coming up for us as we transition from preschool to kindergarten! I am sure it will be an ever-changing plan, but I wanted to share with you where we are in our journey in hopes that you would follow along. Stay tuned to see how all of this looks in real life and for overviews of the activities we’re doing for each new book that we are exploring!