An Easy Morning Time Schedule to Follow

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An Easy Morning Time Schedule to Follow

I don’t know about you, but my family is still working out the kinks in our morning time schedule.

The year began with group time occurring over lunch. Lunch is an awesome gathering point, but it became difficult to drag kids away from their math.

“Just one more problem, Mom!” became the cry. And they don’t even love math! Go figure.

So I decided it would be easier to start our school day with a morning meeting. Now I’m herding the children into the kitchen, handing out playdough or crayons to keep hands busy, and beginning our morning meeting.  My teenagers enjoy keeping their hands busy just as much as the preschoolers.

In addition to changing the time of our morning meeting, I sat down and considered. What would be our ideal morning time schedule?

morning time scheduleOur Ideal Morning Time Schedule

My ideal morning time schedule begins with poetry. There are many poems I’d like the children and me to memorize, and we need to review the ones we have memorized.

We quickly move on into our Tapestry of Grace read-aloud. Right now we’re not working through the book assigned, but instead working our way through Bible Stories in coordination with our ancient history studies.

Mondays:

Geography is studied on Mondays! We study the area of the world we’re studying in Tapestry of Grace. I post the maps on the kitchen wall to reference as we talk about the topography of the area.

I’ve found geography is best done early in the week, so the kids are familiar with it before they read their history books.

Tuesdays:

Tapestry of Grace includes fine art appreciation in the year plan. This not only includes readings from art history books but includes an art concept each week. Last week we discussed emphasis. This week we covered how the ancients used coil and pinch methods to create pots.

In my ideal schedule, we’ll include intricate art projects at this time, such as Greek vases and Egyptian mummies. The art appreciation is aimed at the rhetoric level. The younger kids are tagging along and absorbing what they can!

Wednesdays:

We’re reading through The Story of the World as a family. Everyone enjoys the history, it gives a wonderful background for our weekly history topic and ensures the preschoolers keep up with the family.

The older kids have additional history assignments at their appropriate level. My goal is to complete the history discussions at this time as well. Instead, we usually tack them onto our Friday schedule, which makes for a long day.

Thursdays:

After some thought about how to study science together, I decided to work through The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way by Joy Hakim. Each week I’m reading a chapter and discussing a concept. If all goes well, we’ll be able to add experiments as well.

This is not all the science my older children are doing. My 11th grader is working through chemistry, my 9th grader is studying biology, and my 6th grader is playing around with concepts in physics.

Fridays:

Today is the day for literature discussions! There are literature discussions laid out for both middle school and high school in Tapestry of Grace. We work slowly through these discussions covering setting, characterization, and how the culture affects the work.

Friday is also our day for scheduling the next week. I hand out papers and ensure the kids create reasonable plans for the next week.

The ideal morning time schedule ends with Latin and IEW’s writing. The handy thing about IEW is that it’s set up by units. As we cover the concepts in the units, I assign similar topics at different levels. My 11th grader is expected to complete longer and more detailed writing assignments than his 6th-grade brother.

In Latin, we work on chants and vocabulary together. The children then complete their assignments separately.

Currently, we’re not doing everything in my ideal morning time schedule, but we are completing much of it. My goal is to ease into the full schedule by Easter. Wish me luck!


26 Comments

  1. I, too, think it’s neat how you cover different things each day in your morning meeting time. I shared on Tonya’s post that we have a family read-aloud time which is the equivalent to a morning meeting time except it’s in the afternoon right after lunch. 🙂 It typically works better for us at that time. We focus mostly on a literature read-aloud, but also incorporate poetry, art, and music as well.

  2. You get a lot accomplished during your Morning Time! I love the daily rotation idea of subjects. I might have to give that one a try later this year. Right now we stick with one subject for 3-5 weeks before switching.

    1. Sticking with a subject for 3-5 weeks is an excellent idea! That way if you run short on time every Thursday, you don’t have to worry about skipping a subject routinely. 🙂

  3. Now I’m looking forward to my toddler and baby growing up so we can start formal home-schooling:)
    Thank you for the inspirations!!

  4. Makes me think of all my wonderful homeschool memories. Thanks for sharing your wonderful post at Together on Tuesdays!

  5. I need to get my act together with the morning meeting thing. It sounds so lovely and useful for getting in all of those other things I never seem to get to! I am writing it down as a goal for this month! 🙂

    1. It can be hard to get started. Start by choosing one or two items you really want to cover, such as poetry or memorization, and then build from there. Let me know how your goal works out this month, Kalista!

  6. This sounds wonderful. We do a simplified morning meeting that includes Bible, singing, poetry read aloud, and I read a few picture books for our content. We do more reading after lunch. I was wondering, how do you like Tapestry of Grace for the younger set? My two are just in early elementary, but I don’t know if I will get enough benefit at this age.

    1. I’m just starting TOG for the younger set. My 4th child was in 3rd grade when we started, and my youngest two are preschoolers, so my experience with Lower Grammar is pretty minimal, but I adored using TOG during the Upper Grammar years!

      When my oldest were young, we used Story of the World. It was awesome! So my plan is to combine SOTW and TOG for my youngest 2 as we work through this rotation through history. 🙂

  7. It is nice to get a schedule going that works… although I find that they end up needing to be changed every so often as things come up to change them. 🙂

    1. Life keeps throwing curve balls, doesn’t it. I’ve found it’s a balance between being flexible when needed and structured enough to get things done. 🙂

  8. Sounds good! Our morning time usually consists of me reading out loud (usually something related to history), and then going through our memory box (which covers many subjects). Some days there will also be a little extra something, but usually not.

    Hey, do you use the activity book that goes along with SOTW? I just bought the text book to assist in our studies next year and am trying to figure out if the activity book would be helpful. I wondered if you might have an opinion on that =)

    1. Yes, I love the activity book that goes along with SOTW. The kids color while I read the chapter, we use the discussion questions as conversation starters, the map work is excellent and age appropriate, and the recommended books to read are AWESOME! I didn’t realize how many wonderful picture books we’d missed until I started to work through SOTW’s recommended books in the activity guide. We never did many of the activities, but the other resources were used and loved. 🙂

  9. Interesting, thanks! I’ve heard people say that they liked the activities, but didn’t think there were enough (too many coloring pages and such), so it’s nice to know that it’s all good depending on what works for you and your kids. I’ll probably pick up a copy =)

  10. Sounds great! How is it working out? Are you up to full schedule?
    How long does your morning meeting generally take? I’m struggling to keep it a short morning meeting here – I’m always wanting to add more things!

    1. We’re trying to keep it to 30 minutes. My high school kids have a full day of studying ahead of them, and the preschoolers’ just don’t have the attention span for longer. As for how it’s going, it’s going in spurts. 😉

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