Morning Time Tips
“Morning Time” is a buzzword of modern homeschooling, and as far as I can tell, Cindy Rollins was the first to coin that term during her many years homeschooling her kids.
You might have heard it called by that name or by some of these others: morning basket, morning meeting, morning collective, circle time, etc.
Behind all of these is the same foundational idea that it is useful to have a set time and place to come together and learn things as a family.
My own family started doing our version of morning time a few years into our homeschool career. We use Charlotte Mason’s method, and when we first started out there were many short subjects (like poetry recitation, hymn study, and folk songs) that never seemed to fit into our routine.
They fell to the wayside and a few years went by before I realized that grouping these subjects together first thing in the morning would mean we did them every day.
I then saw a mom on Instagram using menu covers to hold her kids’ memory work and I realized that if I put all of the materials we needed for those morning time subjects into a menu cover, we were even more likely to do them since we had everything we needed in an easy to grab menu.
Our morning time eventually became “Menu Time” in our routine, because it was when we’d pull out our menus and recite and sing together.
Our Morning Time has changed over the years, both as my kids have gotten older, and as I’ve learned more about Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. When they were all under 9, we’d pull our menus out and read and sing through them first thing before digging into our other lessons. Now that my kids are a bit older, we still use them but include other subjects in our Morning Time and alternate between reading and narrating, and using our menus to recite poetry and sing together. I know of other families who use Morning Time just for read alouds or incorporate handcrafts or other activities into their time together. My sister had an infant last year which made it hard to do Morning Time in the morning, so they did it at lunch! The flexibility of Morning Time is one of the best things about it.
No matter what you call it or how you do it, here are five reasons you should incorporate Morning Time into your homeschool day:
Spending time together as a group gets everyone on the same page and makes for a wonderfully peaceful day. I love doing it in the morning because it sets the tone for our whole day.
Prioritizing certain subjects by making them part of your Morning Time routine ensures that you’ll do them and not let them slide. If we have a subject that we just aren’t getting to, like Nature Study or Poetry, I put it into our Morning Time routine and that makes us less inclined to skip over it.
When you’ve done Morning Time consistently, it becomes an essential part of your homeschool and makes learning together a habit.
It’s common for older kids to go off and work independently once they’re able to, and Morning Time provides an opportunity for connection and collaboration between older and younger students who might otherwise not cross paths during the school day. Since mom is part of Morning Time, too, it also gives you an opportunity to learn alongside your kids.
Morning Time is a wonderful way to create a family culture grounded in connection and learning together.
I encourage you to dive in if you haven’t already, and make Morning Time part of your homeschool day.
What subjects could you be learning together as a family instead of independently? Are there things like nature journaling or singing that you just haven’t been able to incorporate into your day?
The most important thing is to keep it simple (don’t try to do it all at once!), and remember that you get to decide what Morning Time looks like for your family.
To learn more about Morning Time, I highly recommend the book Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins. If you’d like to use menu covers to hold your Morning Time resources, you can find them for sale by clicking here.
The Kind Kingdom, The Playful Pioneers, and The Precious People all include beautiful poetry, history read alouds, scripture, and hymns to create a simple and beautiful morning time. You can download a free sample by clicking the title and following the links.
Guest post by Ashley Antkowiak. Find her at @meaningfulhomeschool on Instagram!