How to Get Started with Morning Time

Morning Time is quite a buzz-word in homeschool circles these days.  I first heard of it through Cindy Rollins' old blog Ordo Amoris. We've been beginning our days with Morning Time for about four years now in an effort to not skip over the really beautiful and rich parts of our education that usually get shoved to the side in the busy-ness of a normal day. 

We started small: Bible reading, memory verse, and a read-aloud together.  But gradually over the four years, we've grown into a robust hour of Morning Time on an average day. Here's how I organize and plan it over the summer so that it actually happens during the year. :) 

I begin with this overview chart for the year. 

I organize Morning Time into six terms.  We try to do school on a semi-Sabbath schedule: six weeks on, one week off.  The top chart of the page lays out by each term what Bible passages or catechism questions we'll read, what hymn we will learn, and which Shakespeare play or Plutarch life we will study.  I rotate them, spending one term on each play or life, so we get through three plays, and three lives each year, hopefully! :) 

For catechism, we use Training Hearts, Teaching Minds by Starr Meade along with the Westminster Catechism songs.  For Shakespeare, I follow How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig, and I'm using Renee Matheny's materials on Shakespeare this year as well!  For Plutarch, we use Our Young Folks Plutarch free on mainlesson.com. 

For Composers and Artists, I usually pick 2-3 of each that are relevant to our historical studies.  This year, since I have Harmony Fine Arts Year 4, I'm using some of their ideas to study three 20th century composers and three artists. We'll spend one term on each one, rotating again. 

The bottom grid of my planning page helps me organize our recitations for the year. I set the goal of working on one Scripture passage, one poem, and one Shakespeare passage or speech simultaneously.  This has proven to be do-able for the kids if we just simply read all three each day together or individually. So here, again by terms, I set out to choose the passages in each category we'll commit to memory.  This is where Living Memory by Andrew Campbell comes in to help. 

Living Memory is basically a catalog of rich things to commit to memory. Mr. Campbell has done all the work of compiling a great list that you can choose from and you really can't go wrong.  There's way more in here than we could ever get to!  Each year, I progressively work through the Scripture, hymns, Poetry, and Historical speeches sections, just kind of choosing the next selection that fits for us.  This makes it REALLY easy to pick out recitations for the whole year in under an hour. 

My younger two will be doing their first formal recitations this year, so for them, I'm using a simple little stack of poetry cards I downloaded free from somewhere. I can't for the life of me remember where, it was years ago. But I'm finally putting them to use!  They'll do these and Bible verses. 

In the past we've had binders to keep our recitations in.  The past few years, this has worked fine, but gradually, the binders have become cumbersome and one more thing to keep track of.  This year, I'm trying to be more diligent about actually doing our recitations, so I need to figure out something else. If our binders weren't with us, we'd just skip it. And I had a hard time keeping them organized with the recitations changing regularly, mainly because I didn't always have the next selections ready to print or already printed, and I'd put it off. Then a whole term would have passed before I'd get around to doing it!  So, this summer I am putting together a document that I'll print and put in their one student notebook at the front.  It has: 

-Catechism song lyrics

-Music and verses of all the hymns for the year

-Pictures and short bios of the hymn writers

-Shakespeare selections in order

-Scripture recitations in order

-Poetry recitations in order

-Speech recitations in order

I am hoping by having all of this put together neatly and printed ahead of time, it will make it easier for us to implement our Morning Time plans and reach our goals! The last step is to transfer all the plans from the overview sheet to the sheet for each term, which looks like this: 

This is where I keep track of what we actually do. Those little boxes are not supposed to all be checked, but they sure help me see how many days it's been since we actually did recitations, or read Shakespeare, or sang our hymn! :) It's Morning Time accountability. 

Check out these sheets at my Etsy shop if you'd like to put them to use for your Morning Time plans! They're completely customizable, so you can change the categories, terms, frequency or anything to fit your goals and plans! 

To get started with Morning Time, pick the things you're most excited about, but the things that get pushed off the schedule too often. If that's reading aloud and an artist study, start with that. If that's Bible and recitation, or catechism and Shakespeare, start there!  Start with 1-2 things your first term, and as you feel hungry for more, add one more element until you're satisfied with your Morning Time routine!  It shouldn't look like mine or anyone else's.  It's yours, for your family.  You may need 4 elements for Morning Time, or you may want 15. Morning Time is a great time to gather together as a family and feed your souls on things that nourish us together, to build family culture, and to create memories of shared experiences.  Here's to happy Morning Times this year!