Wednesday

Planning Your Morning Meeting

Making Your Books Work for You

Toward the end of last year I had a brilliant idea. Well, I thought it was brilliant. I wanted to start a blog linkup about scholé learning and teaching from rest. These ideas have been such a HUGE influence over our homeschool the past year, and we are in a better place than ever with the flow of our homeschool and the learning we are achieving all without stress or anxiety. Sound too good to be true? It’s really not, and I wanted to share the nuts and bolts of scholé with the world. I contacted some other homeschool bloggers who are also enthusiastic about teaching from rest, and we decided to begin a monthly linkup where we each share what scholé looks like in our unique homes. We don’t want you to emulate us necessarily, but to use our ideas and our homeschools to find your own place of rest. I’m thrilled to introduce the very first linkup of the Everyday Scholé bloggers, myself, Tonia from The Sunny Patch, and Sara from Classically Homeschooling. The three of us hope to show the nuts and bolts of restful learning and teaching in our homeschools to help you bring peace and rest to yours. This month it’s all about how we start our day…..

Planning Your Morning Meeting

If you followed my From Type A to Scholé series last year, then you know I love to plan. I love to schedule. After beginning a consistent Morning Meeting time last year, I have slowly started to utilize that precious time that starts our school day to pull it all together. I’m going to share how and why I do it.

1) Plan Our Memory Work and Our Hymns

Memory work, I quickly discovered, needed to be planned out. I am not a huge memorization person, but I knew that I wanted to kids to do some memory work during our Morning Meeting time. However, flying by the seat of your pants doesn’t work so well for memory work. I knew I wanted the kids to memorize scripture, poetry, a history timeline, and various other things like skip counting, math facts, basic Bible knowledge, etc. When I set out to plan our new school year that started in January, I knew that I wanted to be more prepared for memory work. I wanted a plan. I started with scripture memorization and realized that it would be much easier if I had a theme, so I chose various psalms to memorize and called it A Year with David. I broke down all of our psalms into the chunks or verses so that I knew exactly what we should be working on that week during Morning Meeting for the entire year. I studied poetry lists and chose all of the poetry the girls would memorize this year and planned that out by stanza so I know exactly which stanzas we would learn each week. We continued using the Veritas Press timeline for our history timeline, but I scheduled exactly what events we’d memorize each week so it would take us 40 weeks {the length of our school year} to cover it all. I selected hymns for us to learn and sing for the entire year. It sounds tedious, but it really wasn’t. Also it was so worth it to open to the correct spot in my Morning Meeting binder and all of the things we need for memory work and hymn study are filed right there.

Morning Meeting binder interior

2) Plan Our Books

I’ll be honest. You don’t have to plan what books you will be using during your Morning Meeting time. I know a LOT of homeschoolers who have a morning time of some sort that are very roll with the punches type of folks who just grab whatever looks good that day, something their kids are into, or something that piqued interest in the past. In fact, our Morning Meeting looked a lot like this when we were starting out. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to be intentional about the books we read. And, you guessed it, I wanted a plan. I made it a point when 2015 rolled around to think long and hard about what books I wanted to read with the kids. Books that I felt brought truth, beauty, and goodness into our home. We always read from the Bible first, but I didn’t have to schedule that because we read whatever passage goes with our Bible curriculum for that day. Our history spines that we read through I’ve already chosen for a few years into the future. But what about the other things I wanted to incorporate: poetry, artist and composer study, tales, myths, and legends, Shakespeare, character, Plutarch. I found things I loved for all of those and I scheduled it. I rotate out some things like Shakespeare, character, and Plutarch, but the rest is done every week. I love having my books planned and preselected for the coming year. It gives me a direction and a certainty that I have what I need when I need it. Plus, I can make sure the books are at the right level to be enjoyed by all. I still change things up if something really grabs our attention, but for the most part I know what we will be reading all year long.

Morning Meeting Plan

3) Plan to Enhance Your Studies

Saturation is the name of the game with this part of Morning Meeting. I use it to full advantage. I know what we are studying all year long for our content subjects. For science we will be studying chemistry and the ocean. For history, we’re learning about the ancient world. For geography, we’re focusing on the Middle East. Using this outline for the year, I can incorporate some of our content subjects into Morning Meeting providing an entire school day experience from start to finish in our current study. Let me explain…right now we are studying geography. For the first three weeks, we’ll be learning about Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. I plan and schedule books that coordinate with this study so that we start our day thinking about these countries and Table Time {our content subject time together} adds another dimension later in the day. I really love to use the tales, myths, and legends part of our Morning Meeting to go deeper in geography and history while for science I like to focus on biographies. Taking this approach has really turned Morning Meeting into a feast of truth, beauty, and goodness for our souls and minds, but also adds a little interest to whet our appetite for more study to come later.

What I realized when I had finished my Morning Meeting planning for this year was that I had a huge tool in my toolbox that could be manipulated in 1,000 different ways to make our homeschool focused and productive, but it would require planning and forethought. The time I spent planning and researching has been well worth it. Our Morning Meeting has risen to a new level in 2015. The best part is that the planning has made Morning Meeting even more restful for me because I know exactly the path we’re on for the entire year. Now I have time to stop and smell the roses along the way.

For more awesome resources to start your day check in with my fellow Everyday Scholé bloggers. I’m sure you will find some great ideas of things to include in your Morning Meeting:

Sara at Classically Homeschooling lists her Morning Time Resources.

Tonia at The Sunny Patch shares her Morning Meeting Resources.

 

Everyday Schole Final Image

Maximizing good books and resources through planning in the tree house,

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6 comments:

  1. I love how you are so intentional about what you include in your meeting time. Lots of good food for thought in this post.

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  2. Your meeting time is wonderfully planned! Right now I'm following inspiration, although a few plans are percolating in the back of my mind, I've haven't planned anything out yet. You've inspired me to plan our morning time better for next week! :-)

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    1. Let me know how it goes. Sometimes planning works for people and sometimes it doesn't!

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  3. WOWSERS!!! Seriously - just.... wow. I am amazed that you planned this so deliberately. Wow. You make a lot of really good points about prepping.... I would love to see more details about what you include.... This is just amazing! I am trying to plan and prep now and came across this and really appreciate it. We homeschooled last year but I was pretty laid back since it was kindergarten. This year will be a little more focused - I want to take better advantage of these sponge-y years and do more memorization, too - thanks for the inspiration! I am now going to go squint to see what I can glean from your well planned out morning time printout. ;)

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    1. I really need to go in a 12 step program for planning addicts! It's fun for me, but for some people it's stressful to try to plan in this much detail. Definitely give yourself some time to find your own planning groove.

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