How do I pick our morning basket items? I try to cover as many subjects as I can and factor FUN into the equation. This year I also scored a great deal from Usborne books so we added some fun stuff from that deal, too.
How do I plan it out? I take a cute little Five Star two subject notebook and I split up each book into its parts and number them. As we complete one part, I check it off. When we check everything off, we either remove it from the basket (or IKEA cart, whatever works for you!), or we start over and do it again. I tab the notebook so it’s easy to find each subject.
OK, that’s enough rambling. Here’s what’s in our morning basket/IKEA cart for 2019-2020:
History of the World in 100 Pictures
This book can be purchased from Usborne and you can click here to buy it from me. This book has 100 pictures and all are numbered so you can do one per day for 100 days (or two a day for 50 days… you get the idea). They are interesting and line up wonderfully with the Timeline Song. It’s a nice quick and easy thing to do each day that adds a little more flesh to our timeline of history.
Last year we used The Step by Step Drawing Book and it was a huge hit for all of us from five year old to adult. This year we will be doing the People book. I also have the dinosaur book in case we finish this one and still have time! If not, we will use dinosaurs next year. This book is also published by Usborne but is available on Amazon as well.
This is also a great tie-in to OiLS drawing from Foundations!
Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare
I am so excited for this one. It’s retellings of six Shakespeare plays in short chapters. It’s a nice, gentle introduction to Shakespeare’s stories that will get them comfortable and prepare them for when it’s time to start reading Shakespeare for real (Challenge I in Classical Conversations).
Last year, I used my cruddy old printer (I bought a new one since then!) and printed famous paintings out for art appreciation. It was ok but the print outs weren’t great so I was PUMPED to find these cards (again they are from Usborne but available on Amazon as well). We use these one at a time and I have the kids look at it for 2-3 minutes quietly and then each of them gets to tell me something they noticed. I tend to do the same painting 3-4 times in a row and they have to tell me something NEW they noticed each time.
We will be folding airplanes in Cycle 2 this year, anyway, so why not add it to our morning time?!? I love adding in fun things like this to take a break from the more academic books. You just rip the pages right out of this book! It has cool designs and pre-marked lines for three different styles of airplane. We will be paper airplane PROS at the end of the year!
Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization
This book will last us a long time, it has so many poems to memorize! I strongly recommend that anyone using this book listen to Andrew Pudewa’s lecture 10,000 Times and Then Begins Understanding to have a really good grasp on the importance of repetition and memorization and all that it does for the brain. (That lecture was LIFE CHANGING for me… seriously, find it and listen!). The basic structure of it is that as you memorize new poems, you continue to recite the old ones to keep them fresh in your mind. The poems go from very short to longer in length.
Yes, we are a CC family and most of grammar comes from Henle or Essentials of the English Language. But I like to work in a little extra from another source so that we get a different perspective. Last year we used Well Trained Mind’s First Language Lessons. This year we will use Our Mother Tongue.
How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare
I am most excited for this one! He walks the family slowly through Shakespeare and teaches us why we should appreciate it. He also walks you through HOW to memorize Shakespeare. It comes with access to a website to print out cards with stanzas printed on them to help in the memorization process. You can also use the website to listen to the memorized pieces. I have been wanting to memorize Shakespeare for a long time and I am just so thrilled to take this on. This is another one that will for sure take more than a year to get through, but I am excited to go on this journey of teaching my kids how to fall in love with Shakespeare!
Confession time. We have been in Story of the World Volume 1 since my oldest was in kindergarten. She’s starting high school. I’m running out of time, ya’ll. We are GOING TO FINISH Story of the World Volume 1 this year no matter what it takes!
I’m not sure I’ve met a home school mom who doesn’t know what Story of the World is, but it’s history written like a story book. It’s wonderfully done and the audiobooks read by Jim Weiss are an absolute treasure (we are SUCH big Jim Weiss fans in this house). The activity book has additional things to add to the book, including art projects, coloring pages, and maps. There is also a rather large book list for each chapter, broken up into fiction and nonfiction. We like to do the coloring pages while listening to the audiobook for the chapter. The next day we do the review questions and map work. The third day and on, we read whichever books sound good from the chapter’s list. Then we go on to the next chapter. The kids are free to use the activity book after school to do any of the art projects.
I tend to go through the reading lists before our year begins and decide which books we are likely to read. I mark them down in my loop schedule notebook and as we get to each chapter, I pull up my library app and put the books for the next chapter on hold so they will be in by the time we need them. Easy peasy.
For CC Families, one other fun thing we do is that each time we start a new chapter, we start at the beginning of the timeline song and sing until we reach whatever we are learning about that day. It helps keep it in context for them and makes them realize the timeline isn’t just a random string of words.
This one is taking us a few years to get through but we were not super consistent with it at first, before starting our morning basket routine. It’s a nice, solid, gentle introduction to Latin. It introduces just one word at a time. We are halfway through and I think have only worked through nominative, ablative, and accusative noun cases in first declension. But it is taking the time to really, REALLY make sure you grasp those concepts before adding more. My 11 year old is getting really good at working through how to translate in Latin. He still has one more year of Foundations/Essentials before he begins Challenge and when he does, I just really think he’s going to be in a different place in Latin than my current Challenge class was. It’s not going to be terrifying to him. He’s been translating Latin forever now! My five year old has heard the sentence “Ego sum nauta” so many times that he is known to say, “I know Latin! Listen! I am a sailor! That’s latin!” hahaha!
Note: I bought the Kindle version. I pull it up on my phone and then mirror the screen to the TV so they can see the sentences to translate. This is the easiest method I’ve found but honestly, writing them out on a white board works just fine as well. It is just a little more time consuming.
Hymns
I just go through the Simply Charlotte Mason website each year and choose a few hymns. We listen to one a day (or whenever we get to them on the loop). I check off when we’ve listened to it to keep track. I usually stay with the same one ten times before moving on. I use YouTube and find a version with the words on the screen and again screen mirror so that everyone can see it.
Memory Work, Composers, Verses
Any week that CC is in session, we recite that week’s memory work together once. If we get to memory work twice in one week, we skip it the second time. They do PLENTY with the memory work outside of family time. But it helps keep my older daughter connected to what the boys are learning and it’s good review for her.
We will be listening to the Cycle 2 composers this year. The Foundations guide has specific pieces chosen and we will listen to those. We usually play them in the background while we do our other work. If you don’t use CC, you can go to Simply Charlotte Mason to find suggested music to listen to.
We try to do the Bible memory for each Cycle but this year I’m debating between that and what the kids are learning for Quiz. The older two will FINALLY be quizzing over the same material so we may make that a part of our family time instead of the CC suggestions. I haven’t really decided yet.
Math Games
We like to play National Number Knockout (N2K). We also play various games from Quick Flip Arithmetic and the Math Facts That Stick series. We play one math game each time we get to it on the loop. It’s a favorite part of the loop for us!
I received this one from National Geographic to review for the blog and realized it would be an excellent, quick little feature in our morning basket. It has one funny, strange, or interesting fact per day. I am sure we will read 3 or 4 a day. The photography in the book is excellent.
I honestly don’t know much about this book yet. It’s brand new from CC and is meant to match up with each week’s memory work for Cycle 2. It has a story and a poem for each of the 24 weeks.
I love this series. It is incredible. I was actually super annoyed that CC made their own cartography book instead of just recommending these. We have the entire series, which includes USA, Canada, each continent (Asia takes two books!), and the world without being broken down into countries. It is excellent prep for Challenge A. We’ve decided to do Draw the USA this year despite it being Cycle 2. I just enjoy that book the most and I think it is the easiest for the five year old to grasp because it’s familiar to him.
And that’s it. Yes, it is a LOT. But please remember, we do this year round, not just for 180 days. We do small, bite sized pieces each day, and we quit after 30-45 minutes, regardless of how much we’ve done. We pick up where we left off the next day and continue on. That way we can enjoy a lot of different subjects and resources all at once.