Morning Time is a time in which we gather together to focus on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. We’ve been doing a “together time” since before I even knew it had a name. However, reading Your Morning Basket this year and listening to the Your Morning Basket Podcast has helped me be especially purposeful in what I put in our morning basket.

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Our Morning Basket Contents

We have daily items and weekly items. We often do not get to everything. When I was in teacher college, we learned to always prepare more than was needed and I got into that habit and seem to still do this in home educating. This list is my ideal – the “if-all-goes-perfectly-and-the-baby-sleeps -and-the-others-don’t-argue” list. Before the baby came along ten months ago, it was much easier to get through all the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in this list in one morning, fitting in all the weekly things too. Now, everything gets rearranged and sometimes (many times) we can’t get to it all. It’s okay with me. I basically put a timer for one hour and see how far we get. Next day, after prayer and religion, I will pick up where we left off on the list and cycle through.

1. Prayer and Bible
2. Religion Loop: we cycle through these, choosing one each day.
   1. Catechism
   2. Saint story
   3. Life of Our Lord for Children
   4. First Communion by Mother Loyola (she wrote our all-time favorite too) Even if you aren’t preparing for First Communion, I highly recommend First Communion. Every time I read a portion of it to the kids, I am inspired to be a better follower of Christ and to renew my effort in looking toward eternity. Mother Loyola just has a gift for being able to write for children without dumbing anything down, so her writing actually really speaks to adults’ hearts, too.
3.  Poetry Loop: we read one poem (or one page) per day rotating through the following and strive to memorize the ones from resource #3 and #4.
   1. Ambleside Online Year 3 poems
   2. Ambleside Online Year 1 poems
   3. The Harp and Laurel Wreath
   4. Poetry Memorization from IEW
4. Habit Training:  Laying Down the Rails
5. Scripture Memory: psalms from the Prayer resource we use
6. Hymn and Folk Song: I have kind of dropped hymns (gasp) because the kids get to sing hymns in our church choir. We were using this hymn book in last year’s morning time. And for folk songs, we LOVE the Little House Folk Song book, but this American Song Treasury was our favorite before. We also sometimes dip into From Sea to Shining Sea, but I like the song treasury better.
7. French and/or Spanish read-aloud– we have a lot of books in these languages but I sometimes also find some at the library. Our favorite French books are the Emilie books. I also use Cherrydale Press French and Spanish books in this slot, but not both on the same day!
8. Literature – this one is always changing and is usually from the Year 1 or 3 Ambleside Free Read list. However, currently we are reading Canadian Summer. If you haven’t read the three books about the Mitchells, you really should. They are humorous and lovely; my kids love them.
9. Music Appreciation: now that we’ve done almost all the SQUILT volumes, we are just following the Ambleside Online Composer study once a week.
10. Picture Study: I print off the Ambleside Online suggestions and laminate them and we narrate one print per week.
11. Math: I recently added a fun math book to our mornings a couple of times per week to try to spark some more “wonder.” I’ve also added Mathematicians Are People Too.
12. Geography and Art History – I realize that is a lot of geography titles, but they are all different and we enjoy all of them. It might just take us longer to get through them. The following are on a loop:
    1. Hillyer’s Geography
    2. Charlotte Mason’s Geography
    3. Long’s Geography
    4. Hillyer’s Art History (I have a super old edition that includes Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture).

So there you have it. It seems like a lot, but it is all things we love and look forward to, and we aim for one hour and then move on and if there’s some extra time later in the day, we might continue some more readings, or, more likely, we will just go outside and enjoy being in nature instead.

As we strive to spend more time out in nature, we find our nature collection growing. When the kids were younger, it comprised mostly of rocks and sticks. Now, at 6 and 8, they are becoming discriminate and our nature collection has becoming more varied.

We use three shelves as our main nature display. I wish we had something like a letterpress drawer to display some of it on the wall, but for now we use acrylic containers salvaged from my parents’ house, thrifted wooden bowls, and unused vases to contain our nature items on the shelves.

We have the good fortune of a nature center which rewards nature items with points. With these points, one can purchase other nature items. Points can also be earned by doing nature projects, doing scavenger hunts at the nature center, and filling in a reading log. The kids have “bought” gypsum rocks, porcupine quills, moonstones, and other items.

We found a dying butterfly at Kroger one day in the fall and brought that home for the collection

We also have many gems and fossils from our days of being members of the Tellus Museum.

Ideas for your nature collection display:

1. think outside the box and be creative
2. repurpose what you have around the house
3. visit thrift stores for pretty dishes and bowls
4. have tools for observation – magnifying glass, jewelers loupe, microscope (that is the one we own and enjoy)
5. use various acrylic containers
6. include field guides nearby
7. frame your nature
8. group like items together and create labels (these chalk markers work well)
9. have nature journals handy
10. add beautifully illustrated nature books – like this one, or this one, or Brambly Hedge, or Beatrix Potter books.

“Consider, too, what an unequalled mental training the child-naturalist is getting for any study or calling under the sun––the powers of attention, of discrimination, of patient pursuit, growing with his growth, what will they not fit him for?” -Charlotte Mason

Keeping a nature collection allows the wonder for the outdoors to continue once you come inside. I’m all about nurturing my children’s wonder for God’s creation. On your next rainy day, when nature study comes up on the homeschool loop, all you have to do is reach for the display, take up one item and wonder at it out loud and watch the children wander over to wonder too.

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We start school later than I like again – it’s almost 10:00am. We read the Bible, pray, read a Catechism lesson from Our Heavenly Father, do our memory work (poetry, hymn, Bible verse, French nursery songs, and Shakespeare). I am WAY behind on our French again, but get the feeling this week is a write-off.

Bear gets Math, EFRU, and cursive done. She is supposed to work on her map of Seabird, but ends up doing her Latin lesson instead. Latin is supposed to be done 4 times per week, but looks like this crazy-full-of-play-dates-and-sun-filled-days week will limit Latin to one day.

Meanwhile, J-jo and I do math, copywork, and spelling.

Next, I read a chapter of Our Island Story for history. J-jo volunteers to narrate it, even though officially, he isn’t supposed to narrate until next year. I am pretty impressed with how much he retains and comprehends. He loves Our Island Story and never wants to miss me reading it aloud. He gets very attached to certain countries and kings, and he gets pretty upset when history doesn’t pan out the way he would have wanted.

Seabird is also on the schedule, but Bear announces she finished it. She narrates it for me.

We head to the park to meet friends after lunch. We come home in time to eat a snack and drive to choir practice at church. Choir ends at 6:30pm and of course, I did not plan a crockpot dinner so I will have to cook something when we get home. This means the kids will get to bed very late (9:30pm). Piano gets practiced while I am cooking.

See the rest of the week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

We started Ambleside Online this year. I had looked at it often, but never taken the plunge. However, God led me to various bloggers who were using Ambleside. Visiting their homeschools through their blog posts completely inspired me to try Year 2 with Bear this year.

It took a while to find a groove. I fought Charlotte Mason on a daily basis. The AO website for Year 2 recommends only penmanship, copywork, phonics (which Bear doesn’t need much of at this point), foreign language, and math as daily subjects. No grammar, no Latin, no vocabulary, and so on. The rest of the curriculum is through literature and living books (I highly recommend you take a look here so you can see what kinds of books get read through the year). Yet, I had a hard time letting go of my preconceived notions of what needed to get done in a day. CM recommends short lessons, but Bear’s math was taking 45 – 60 minutes per day to get done. I also kept trying to add in extra things like Latin, vocabulary, grammar, writing programs, and other things that weren’t truly needed. I was leaving out the essential extras like nature study and journalling, and composer and artist study (or just not getting to them regularly enough).

Slowly we changed. First, we tried to keep everything. I shortened the math lessons – set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes. I let go of grammar. I decreased extra writing lessons to twice a week. We kept Latin, but set a timer for 15 minutes. We kept English from the Roots Up, but decreased the time on it to 5 to 10 minutes.

Now, on week 32, I think we’ve gotten into a rhythm and routine that works for our family and that I can make work next year with a new baby.

In the next few posts, I’d like to give you an inside peek at a week with Ambleside Online Year 2 so you can see how we fit it all in, and in fact, how we are now done earlier in the day than we used to. We are just Ambleside Online novices and our way is just one of the many ways Charlotte Mason principles can get done. However, it does help to get a glance into other people’s homeschools and I wouldn’t have found our “system” without the help of many bloggers. I took the bits I thought would work for us from each of those blogs I visited. (Afterthoughts, Joyous Lessons, Sage Parnassus, the AO forum, and many more).