Morning Times with a Morning Basket
I’m in a lot of homeschool mom groups on Facebook. Lately there have been a lot of questions regarding “morning baskets,” popularized, I think, by Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers accounts I think most people have baskets full of ice breaker style worksheets for their kids to grab and go when they are otherwise busy with stuff. But our Morning Baskets have been a little different, organically grown over the years as a Morning Time over breakfast where we, as a family, wake up together. It includes our Scripture Memory Box (an idea I got from a Sonja Shafer YouTube video about four or five years ago. Our “basket” includes a poetry recitation, a hymn study, Thomas Aquinas’s Student’s Prayer (thanks to Kate Alva of The Atrium). The point is not what it is in our basket, however, it’s about the journey we took to get there.
First, I read Habits of the Household by Earley, which I read in 2022. My second child was one year old and I did a re-dive into parenting and homeschooling research to make sure that I wasn’t bringing old bad habits to a new childhood and that I was creating the family culture I desired now that I had more than one kid and stable household. I found Earley’s book very affirming as I was already doing a lot of what he recommended, but I wanted to add more and really dive into the idea of liturgies. Earley’s book and listening to the Literary Life Podcast led me to Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love by Cindy Rollins.
What I learned from those books is that starting the day with scripture and a morning prayer isn’t just my ideal, my kids thrive with it. I learned that my sudoku and logic puzzle routine could be substituted with other things from their education, taking something off their afternoon plate, as the season requires: diagramming a sentence, balancing a chemical equation, factoring a trinomial. Balancing a chemical equation every morning together as a family when my oldest was between 6th and 7th grades set her up to do high school Chemistry in 8th grade (with a high school aged friend of hers) with a lot less tears than I expected. Warming up to difficult subjects in bite sized pieces over breakfast just seems to be the most efficient way to tackle the idea that we can, in fact, learn to do hard things.
Over the years, our morning times have included Plutarch, various nature readings (like Gilbert White and Sam Keen), and the Ambleside Online Hymns and Folksongs. It has included the United States citizenship test (as recommended by Cindy Rollins) in seasonal cycles. It has always included the Catechism from the Truth & Grace Memory Books (that I bought while visiting a church led by Voddie Baucham. We have always included Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but after following Cindy Rollins, I was encouraged to add The Faerie Queene, previously I had planned to assign it in the upper high school years–I’m glad I didn’t wait. We enjoyed Dante’s Divine Comedy, as an extended basket time, in car rides on the way to choir. As I have had more children it has become something that goes until we have an activity that requires us to leave the house or the youngest children depart to play outside as their attention spans drop off.
No matter what you include in your basket time, if you’re overwhelmed in your homeschool or your parenting this is a guaranteed way to simplify it. Bring back the cozy, bring back core truths and beauty to your mornings. Adding these bits into the start of your day truly do take things off your plate at the end of your day. (Or if your kids are in public school, adding these enrichment activities to your evenings can bring back the togetherness you long for in your family and supplement their life at school.)
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Anakalian Whims 