Wednesday

A Morning Meeting Espresso Shot

I myself am not a coffee drinker, but most of my friends and my spouse are. From what I understand, there is nothing more necessary enjoyable than starting your day with a hot cup of your favorite blend. Especially if you can really savor and linger over it in the quiet stillness of the morning. This is how I view our normal Morning Meeting routine; it’s an hour to an hour and a half of savoring and lingering over truth, beauty, and goodness. But let’s face it. Just like a coffee drinker, sometimes we don’t have the time or ability to linger over our Morning Meeting time. For those days we might just need an espresso shot to get us through.

Morning Meeting Espresso Shot

The need for a quick, but power-packed version of Morning Meeting came from my annoying perfectionist tendency to not do things if I can’t do them perfectly. I would skip Morning Meeting because we didn’t have time to do the full lingering cup. However, I noticed that our days seemed to not run as well when we don’t take the time for at least some of that truth, beauty, and goodness diet.

Which led me to ask, “If I had to do the bare minimum of our Morning Meeting time, what things would I include to make it power-packed and effective?”

Hymn

Prayer

Bible Reading

Bible Memory Work

I kept all of these parts of Morning Meeting and didn’t cut any of our Bible time because it’s definitely the number one thing we do in our Morning Meeting and our family culture.

History Timeline Song

Academic Memory Work

I kept these two items because I wanted to make sure we do our memory work as much as possible and because my kids love the history timeline song and it doesn’t take very long at all.

Art or Music Appreciation

Poetry Reading

Poetry Memory Work

So much beauty and goodness in these three items that they had to stay in my espresso shot approach. We love to linger here and contemplate even on shortened days.

Content Subject Focus

I kept this one for a matter of expediency. When we get to Table Time later in the day I want to make sure we’ve already covered our content reading earlier in the day during Morning Meeting.

Now that I had my bare minimum of things I wanted to cover, I had to make sure I hadn’t totally nullified my intentions: to make Morning Meeting quicker.

I had to figure out, “How long does all of this take?”

This was the simplest part; I timed it while we were using our quick version one morning. It came in at 30-35 minutes which was perfect. If it had been any longer I would have looked at my list and tried to cut something else until I got it in the 30 minute range.

Making sure that we kept a Morning Meeting time in our homeschool day was super important to me. I didn’t want to write off that special time just because I didn’t have time to do it perfectly. Now I’ve got the best of both worlds. We can enjoy a long, lingering cup of Morning Meeting when we have time or we can fit a super quick espresso shot of Morning Meeting when it’s necessary.

This is the second part of the Everyday Scholé blog linkup about Morning Meeting. You can find the first post about Morning Meeting resources here.

Everyday Schole Final Image

And of course you must check out my fellow Everyday Scholé bloggers, Tonia and Sara as they share their Morning Meeting scheduling tips as well:

only child homeschooling morning meeting  Morning Time Schedule

Making Morning Meeting small, but powerful in the tree house,

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5 comments:

  1. I love the idea of an 'espresso shot' meeting when there isn't time for a full meeting!

    Sometimes I see moms saying they can't have a morning meeting because they don't have an extra 1-2 hours in their day. But you can certainly accomplish quite a bit in a much shorter amount of time - it's a matter of focusing on the most important things.

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  2. I do enjoy a good cup of decaffeinated coffee! :) I've already shared about our family read-aloud time on Tonia's and Sara's posts. It's our equivalent of a morning meeting time. There are days from time to time when it doesn't work out for us to have our family read-aloud time after lunch. On those days, most times I try to work it in at another time in the day...usually in the evening after dinner. I also found that trying to fit in a lot of different types of readings didn't seem to work as well for us. So we focus on a literature read-aloud and also incorporate poetry, art, and music. From time to time we may throw in another type of book, such as a history read-aloud, etc. But we mainly focus on the literature read-aloud along with some poetry, art, and music. :)

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  3. That's a great idea for busy and crazy days! I know there are days around here where everyone is jittery, and I'm fighting to keep the morning meeting going. I'll have to create an espresso shot for myself!

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  4. Thanks so much for walking us through this! I have a quick question. On the CCM website, they suggest spending two hours introducing the memory concepts (say on the first Monday of that two week cycle), followed by 20 minute daily sessions for two weeks after that to ensure full memorization. That sounds like an awful lot of time, and doesn't really match up with the schedule you have here. If CCM took 20 out of the 30 minutes for morning meeting, you'd have only ten minutes to cover the hymn, prayer, Bible reading, art/music and content subject, not to mention that initial 2 hour block they recommend! So how much time have you found CCM to take, realistically? Any hints or tips for planning out the memory work? Feel free to make that its own post. :) Thanks again for being such a great resource and inspiration.

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