Want some ideas of what you can include in your morning menu? I’m going to show you how we put ours together.
What is a morning menu and why would you consider using one? Starting the day off right can really set your homeschool in the right direction.
After all our years homeschooling, implementing a Morning Time has been THE game changer! I’m going to share the details of what we include in our morning menu. I’ll also include links to where I found each insert in case you find something that could help your family.
After you’ve read this post, I hope you’ll feel equipped and inspired to put your own together!
This post is all about putting together a morning menu to use in your homeschool.
What is Morning Time
Morning Time, or Morning Basket or Morning Collective, is a such a helpful thing to implement. Especially for families with multiple kids, it can simplify a homeschool rhythm.
Rooted in Charlotte Mason ideas, Morning Time typically includes beauty subjects that the whole family can do together. Some examples would be read alouds, Bible reading, poetry, picture study, habit training, and hymns. The possibilities are really up to what works for your family.
Some choose to efficiently combine students in close levels for history or science readings. We often go that route, and you can see what we plan to do as a family here. Our main objective is to promote truth, goodness, and beauty during this time.
What is a Morning Menu
“To introduce children to literature is to install them a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitly served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child’s intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find.” – Charlotte Mason
If we are to provide our children with a feast, why not start with a menu? The best part about having one is you can customize it to whatever suits your family’s desire. We picked up these specific ones from Meaningful Menus. However, you can also conveniently grab these from Amazon too.
Ideas for Morning Menu Inserts
As mentioned earlier, this can be a variety of things. I’ll provide you with what we plan to use for inserts during this school year, but each family will look different based where they are at. Hoping some examples and resources are helpful to get the ball rolling!
1. Morning Menu Cover
Our cover, pictured above, is from the Student Sheets from A Gentle Feast Cycle 1. It is a downloadable printable that I print out on cardstock annually. During read alouds, they will color it and make it their own. Since I just love the quote and design, I have been using this on repeat. You can create your own with a verse or homeschool or family mission statement.
2. Memory Passage
We select a Bible passage each 12-week term to work on memorizing. Since we are using A Gentle Feast, Cycle 4, I pulled the memory passage from their morning time schedule. Using Canva, I put the passage in a design, and printed on cardstock for each child.
3. Scripture Reading
Using the same morning time plans from A Gentle Feast, I typed out 12 weeks worth of verses on one sheet using Canva. This way, it is easy for the children to know what verse to pull up in their Bible each morning. Whatever work I can do upfront to lighten my daily load in our day is worthwhile for me!
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4. Poetry
I used to print out poems from Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization from IEW since it came with the PDF download. However, since then, we stopped working towards memorizing poetry, and just simply enjoy reading them. So I am not including this in our menu, but have for years in the past, and it was so handy.
5. Hymns
If it is a busy day, hymns can easily be the item I decide to skip. However, after working through hymns more, I am finding a lot of fruit from investing the time here. First of all, the lyrics are just beautiful. The power of singing these words together in unison feels like corporate prayer. It is uniting and transforming, no matter what mood you are in.
The book Then Sings My Soul by Robert J. Morgan has been a great resource to learning the background of each hymn. I print off our hymn from this free resource called Happy Hymnody. They offer a downloadable lyric sheet and sheet music. Copywork downloads are also available.
That is what we included in our morning menu to start off the new school year. This can easily be set up affordably so you are ready for Morning Time.
Other Posts You May Like:
- The Best Homeschool Planner and Narration Notebooks
- Studying the Bible in Homeschool
- Review of The Peaceful Press: The Precious People
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