Last year was the first year that we instituted the “Morning Hour” which is all the rave in homeschooling right now.  It’s sometimes called a morning basket or a morning meeting.  I have found it to be one of the most productive additions to our homeschool day.  It took awhile to work out what worked for our family.  I took awhile to grow into it. My favorite place to get inspired about Morning Hour has been this site.  (Some of the links in this post are affiliate links.  Most are not.  All are honest recommendations.)

Morning Hour is the first start of your day.  It’s when you gather all the kids, regardless of age, and be inspired to learn.

Morning hour is about inspiration.  It’s not about checking things off a list.  It’s not about sitting still.  It’s not about being school-ish.  Although those things may happen during the hour, they are not the goal.

Morning hour is about setting our minds on things that are true, beautiful and good.  

It’s about setting our children’s hearts in the right direction, at the beginning of the day.

I have our morning hour broken into 5 parts, based on what I want to tackle with my kids when we are all together:

Truth

Beauty

History

Geography

Diligence

I need to figure out another word for History and Geography that fits with the rest.  We just study history and geography as a family, and it’s easiest to do it when we’re all together so that I don’t have to gather them all later.

Truth

We read either a devotional or a chapter of the Bible.  We have gone through several devotionals that are well done, and I would recommend, I have recently been inspired by the book For the Children’s Sake in which the author says that most of children’s exposure of the Bible is through stories, or watered down children’s books.  She says we should be reading straight from the Scriptures, and exposing them to God’s actual Word from an early age.  So this year for our “Truth” section we are doing just that.  We started reading through one of the gospels (John) and are currently in Romans.  I intend to read through the epistles with them for the rest of the year, as I’ve realized since they are not story-heavy, they have not heard any of it before.  It’s really been enjoyable and encouraging for all of us.

Then we work on our Bible memory work.  This year we are working on memorizing the 3 chapters of the Sermon on the Mount.  We are adding roughly a verse a day, and I don’t know if we’ll make it to the end of the sermon by the end of the year.  I haven’t counted it out.  We just keep moving forward.  If we finish earlier, we will start memorizing something else.  If we finish later, than I guess we will just continue memorizing it next year.

Beauty

We are on a 4 day week at home, like many homeschooling families, because we spend 1 day a week at our co-op.  Each of our days at home have a theme.  We pull from a variety of poetry books.  This one is my favorite for studying poetry from a child’s perspective.

Day 1: poetry

During this portion, we work on: memorizing a poem together, and reviewing past memorized poetry.

Day 2: Music

I have found my favorite resource ever for learning about classical music.  It’s free, I don’t have to do any work, and it lasts exactly 6 minutes, which is perfect timing for our morning hour.  It’s a podcast that I’ve subscribed to called “Classics for Kids.”  It’s a 6 minute show explaining a piece of music or a composer, and giving the background story.  My kids were skeptical of this at first, but it has turned out being their favorite, as they are often bent over laughing from the stories.  The little girls often dance to this portion as we listen.

Day 3: Art appreciation

We have been using the art prints through Simply Charlotte Mason.  Basically we work on our skills of observation.  I set an art print on the table, and set a timer.  The kids have to look at the art piece together for 2 minutes without talking.  When the timer is done, they can raise their hands and tell me what they noticed about the art piece.  I’m always astounded at their observations.  They notice things in the background, reoccurring themes, or say what they like or hate about it.  The little booklet that comes with it has a paragraph or two about each piece, and I’ll usually read that after we are all done talking.  If the kids are chatty, sometimes we’ll discuss more once they know the background combined with their observations.  I don’t force this discussion if it’s not flowing.  They usually want to talk about it, though.

Day 4: Handwriting

The younger kids work on handwriting everyday because they are still learning it.  I have added this back into art for the older kids who know how to write, but have gotten sloppy.  They will write out in their best handwriting a famous quote.  I have found some great printables for this HERE.  We talk about adding beauty to all parts of our lives, and leaving each job we touch more beautiful than when we found it.  Like I said before, it’s not about demanding perfection, but about inspiring them for the rest of their day.

History

My plan has always been to read the Story of the World on rotation during history time because it’s just so well done.  (It comes in 4 volumes, and we do one a year on rotation.  I linked to Volume 1.) The activity book has some great projects in there too which occasionally I’ll prepare for this time.  In reality, my kids prefer the audiobooks for this series, and we listen to it on our long car driving days.  Doing this, we go through the book for the year about 4 times.

So, for the history portion of morning hour, I read aloud to them from a different story book or biography.  Last year we read through the Magna Charta which talked about the history leading up to the Magna Charta, and the history directly following.  This year we have started with Poor Richard which is fun biography on Benjamin Franklin.

Geography

Sometimes we’ll look at a map related to the history we just read.  This historical atlas is great fun for that.  Sometimes we use the maps given in the activity guide for Story of the World.  Sometimes we work on drawing a map using this series.  (We have drawn the United States, and we are currently working on drawing Europe.)

Diligence

This portion is where we work on subjects that we need to get done together, and are more technical.  Silje is excused for this portion, because she is past all these things, and is working on her own version of these topics at our co-op.  We review our Classical Conversations memory work.  This year we are also doing Sing Song Latin together.  Sometimes we work on grammar or spelling.  I have our school laptop ready for this portion as we watch a bit of the latin video, or play the memory work CD.

I used to avoid doing this type of technical work during morning hour.  I’m not inspired by the technical aspect of things.  I have since learned that some of my kids are absolutely inspired by technical things.  I’ve learned that my sons love grammar work because it’s the “building blocks” of language.  Doing something they are great at doing is a great way to start the day.  Not only that, but technical things are more concrete than “tell me what you think” about an art piece.  Adding a technical aspect has brought balance.

Starting Out

I don’t know about you, but my kids are squirrel-y.  We started off small.  Morning hour started out as no more than 20 minutes.  We started doing our Bible reading, and then either history or art.  Once we could do that well, we started doing Bible, history and art.  Then I started adding Bible memory work to Bible reading, and geography to history.  One we did those well, we added diligence to the end.  It now takes us a full hour to complete.

Feel free to add or delete whatever you like.  Last year we added some Shakespeare in place of history for awhile.  Sometimes we were wild and crazy and did Shakespeare and history, but skipped spelling and memory work.  You don’t have to study all the things everyday.  You can loop subjects like that.

Leave morning hour with everyone knowing what they have to do next.  We have our morning “tea time” at 10am.  So if it’s just 15 minutes until then, I’ll give them some free time.  If it’s a good morning, and we started on time, they may have 30 minutes to work on their instrument practice, reading, or math.  Don’t just let them scatter.  End the hour with an outline of the plan for the day, so they know what is expected of the

them what things they can do for fun when their work is done.  I don’t know why, but my kids need to review all this information everyday.  It’s like they forget they’re doing school that day otherwise.

Remember, it’s not about crossing a lot off the list (even though you cross a ton off the list during this hour).  It’s not about pushing them hard or exasperating everyone.  Morning hour is not about drudgery.

It’s about inspiring them for the day, lavishing on encouragement and pointing them in the right direction of curiosity, observation, and history, which teaches that they work not just for themselves, but that they are a part of a bigger story.

Seriously, morning hour is the best thing to hit our homeschool.

To use the 4 day morning hour planning chart that I use, you can find it ready to print HERE.

If you prefer a 5 day morning hour planning chart, you can use this one HERE.