The Morning Basket

My favorite homeschool routine discovery has been "The Morning Basket". Why, you ask? Let me tell you...

The morning basket doesn't have to be fancy. It can be a box, crate or basket. And it's what I'm using to start the homeschool day out on the right foot. I use my Weekly Homeschooling Concept plan with the basket however, the basket itself has it's own routine. Here's what we do:

• We gather in the homeschool room and I announce it's time to dive into our morning basket. 
• We start with a short, easy morning prayer and thank God for giving us brains to learn. 
• We then do our Day Description activity. We look at the calendar, hang up which day of the week it is, the date, the month and what the weather is like outside. This is obviously for smaller children, but for older children and teens, you can get more involved like reading something that happened on this day in history or diving into the weather forecast. A Farmer's Almanac could be fun as well. 
• We then read our verse of the week out loud and talk about what it means. 
• I then pull out our weekly book. Currently, we're reading the same book in one setting but as they get older, we'll start doing longer novels and read a few pages out loud together. 
• The last thing we do is a fun, quick and engaging activity. This could be a quick craft, telling jokes, a small puzzle, etc. The point of this activity is to get them engaged and warm up their brain as we move into dedicated subjects. 

And that's it! So easy and so fun. Kids of all ages can enjoy it and it's a great way to bring everyone together first thing in the morning to start the school day. I keep the entire week's worth of items in this basket and I pull from it as we move through the subjects of the day and week.