You see my heart desires to have a Restful, Lovely, Relaxing school year. I have visions of just being with my kiddos piled up on the floor reading, reading, reading. That is actually what I wanted last year but with the addition of Baby #12 I found myself just sliding back in to my usual ways of listing out on the white board what the kids needed to accomplish each day and fuss at them from the kitchen to stick to their work. It was the exact opposite of what I wanted for our year.
But God in His graciousness allows us to start again fresh, letting go of regrets and refocusing on a new year! One of the things that God has brought to my attention this year is the concept of "Morning Time". Type it in on Pinterest and you will find lots of information about it but basically it is a time to gather everyone together(morning or not) and learn together. Most things that you will read about Morning Time talk about using that together time to focus on Truth, Beauty and Goodness. I just LOVE that. Sometimes I feel like I am just throwing information at my kids without really providing any time for discussion or relating it to anything. There are things I have wanted to do with them that just don't seem to fit in the busyness of the day, like Nature Study, Scripture Memory, Poetry, Character Study, Hymn Study and Art. History always ended up being hit or miss with my littles so having a time for that and Read Alouds was important to me as well.
I purchased the book "Your Morning Time" by Pam Barnhill. I am working on reading it through for the second time. In the book she walks you through the "Why" of Morning Time, shows you how you can plan your Morning Time and gives some suggestions for resources you can use, although you are free to include whatever you choose.
I am one who likes to use my own things so I scoured my bookshelves to find things I have wanted to read with my children and added them to a shelf to remind me that I want to incorporate them at some point. They were things like Nature Readers that I have collected through the years, some animal books from Usborne and a History audio that I downloaded from Character Concepts. I also purchased a set of Art cards from Usborne books to use as a very light Art study. There are lots of things you can do for Hymn study and Character Study so it is just a matter of choosing what you like.
My hope is that by doing a couple of special things each day we can just rest and enjoy our time together in the morning before heading to the table to do our everyday subjects.
I hope that you too may be encouraged to look into using a Morning Time with your children and enjoying searching out things to enjoy together that will inspire Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
I want to give credit to Joy at Artful Homemaking for originally introducing this topic to me. Her post is written so much better than I can explain so be sure to hop on over there and give it a read.