Feeding the Body and the Soul: Breakfast Reading on the Range

The topic of a Circle Time or Morning Basket keeps showing up in the Mater Amabilis facebook group. I think some people make this concept seem more complicated than it needs to be. Basically, whatever you call it, this is the time when all of your homeschooling children are gathered together.

At our house, it's called "Breakfast" and it usually takes about thirty minutes.

Generally, I wake up hungry and my children don't. (Second Son is the worst; he prefers not to eat until ten or eleven in the morning. Then, of course, he wants to eat all day for the rest of the day.) So I eat breakfast while they wander the house and gaze out windows. Then, when they're ready to eat, or when a grown-up demands they come to the table (whichever comes first), we start our school day. Whatever fancy or elaborate Circle Time or Morning Baskets may be possible, I like a simple structure:

• Prayer
• Scripture
• Virtues
• Something Good or True or Beautiful

There you go. The contents of any particular bullet point will vary depending on the ages of your children. Here's what we do now (with a 6th grader, 3rd grader, 1st grader, and pre-kindergartener).

• We say a morning offering. We all have it memorized now, but I still have it printed on pretty paper and laminated. (This prayer is absolutely perfect if you only have little ones. I'm always considering switching us all to Morning Prayer, but haven't.)
• I read a psalm. I have Kansas Dad's Book of Psalms illustrated by Valenti Angelo, a book I love dearly. Early on, I'd only read a few lines, but now the children can be mostly quiet for most of an entire psalm. We also read from My Big Book of Catholic Bible Stories in the past, when we weren't studying Old Testament or New Testament history.
• We have a set of small virtue cards from Education in Virtue. Each day I read the virtue, the prayer, and the saint (if it's a new one). There's also a Scripture reference. We've had some good discussions around these cards and I like how the virtues are linked to actions the elementary children can understand. In the past, we've also used PACE. Lots of different resources could fill this niche like The Children's Book of Virtues, The Children's Book of Heroes, or the Catholic Treasure Box books. It's likely there's something sitting on your shelves right now that would fit, something you probably always wanted to use but weren't quire sure where to fit it in.

Then I read. I start with our "cultural studies." Each day we focus on one of the following:

• Fairy Tales or Saint Stories - Currently we're reading The Book of Saints and Heroes by Andrew and Lenora Lang. The stories are pretty long, so I spread them over two days.
• Poetry - We read a bit of poetry, just for listening pleasure. Currently, it's The Cuckoo's Haiku: and Other Birding Poems. I generally spread a book of poetry over a few days, too. You can see some of our other poetry selections using the poetry tag.
• Picture Study - We study an artist over the course of many weeks. We do actual picture study with four to six works I've printed, interspersed with picture books or stories about the artist.
• Shakespeare - We're reading through How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare and memorizing as we go. Occasionally, we'll read something else about the play we're studying.
• Math - We don't do this now, but I want to add something like this for next year so send me all your suggestions.

If the children are still eating when I finish our cultural studies loop selection for the day, I might read Second Daughter's history reading. Everybody studies the same historical time period, but First Son and First Daughter read their work independently. If I read aloud to all of them, it's something interesting and applicable to everyone. Then I ask Second Daughter to narrate followed by the others. It gives us a bit of common ground and demonstrates narration for Second Daughter (some better than others, but that's life).

If people are still eating (it happens; they're slow eaters), then I dive into the read-alouds. We generally have three going at any given time and I'll alternate depending on what we read the day before, my mood, which book is at a more exciting point, or which book is due back to the library the soonest.

• historical fiction set in our world history time period (currently Mystery of the Roman Ransom)
• historical fiction set in our American history time period, or something else "American" I want to share (currently The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures)
• a family read-aloud just for fun (currently The Story of the Treasure Seekers)

If I read a bit from each of the novels after history and all the earlier selections, we spend an hour together over the breakfast table. Sometimes, if we're rushing off to an appointment or something, we may not even get to our cultural studies. The prayer, virtue card, and psalm generally take five to ten minutes.

The italic print: Links to Amazon are affiliate links. As an affiliate with Amazon, I receive a small commission if you follow one of my links, add something to your cart, and complete the purchase (in that order). I like to use the little I earn on the blog to purchase birthday and Christmas gifts (so they'll really be from me because the kids say I don’t have any money).

The links to the virtue cards and to Lang's book are not affiliate links. 

Loops for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful on the Range

I'm trying something new this year: loop scheduling. I read about it first at Amongst Lovely Things and after some consideration decided it might be the perfect solution to our Friday-problem. Our problem was that there seemed to be a day or two of the week that was always being "missed." Fridays, for example, seem to be the day-of-choice for organized field trips. Mondays or Tuesdays seemed to be appointment days. Given a few of those weeks in a row and I'd find us woefully behind where we wanted to be in something like Shakespeare (scheduled for Fridays) but comfortably moving along in other subjects.

I've developed loop schedules for my preschool student (Second Son) and my first grade student (Second Daughter), both of whom need plenty of "you-and-me" time. (The independent work seems to get done even when we're running around like crazy, so no loops for that yet.)

I call our main loops the Cultural Loop and the Listening Loop. After reading this post over at Wildflowers and Marbles (a fantastic blog, but be prepared for serious food for thought!), I realized these loops include the Good, the True, and the Beautiful of our homeschool plans. Other than our read-alouds, these are the subjects around which we gather at the dining room table, often with food or handicrafts in front of us.

Second Son not memorizing Shakespeare

The Cultural Loop
Fairy Tales
Poetry
Picture Study
Shakespeare


Every day, we begin our lesson time with morning prayer and read a psalm. Then I see what's next on our cultural loop. We started the year with Fairy Tales. On the second day we read some Poetry. On the third day we did a picture study. On the fourth day we memorized some lines from a Shakespeare play. Then, we started all over again. If we have time for our cultural loop five days a week, we double up on one of the subjects. If we have a bunch of appointments or illness or craziness, we may only get through two or three of the subjects but no single subject is suffering from a lack of attention. Or, rather, we're not suffering from a lack of any one subject week after week.

The Listening Loop (2015-2016)
Composer Study
Science Songs (not during Advent)
Making Music Praying Twice
Folk Songs (not during Advent)
Patriotic Songs (not during Advent)
Songs of the Liturgical Year (Advent, Christmas, and Lent only)
[updated later to add links to the posts for each playlist]



Using my awesome speaker, I'm able to fill our home with beautiful and sometimes playful music from my laptop, but we don't always have time for listening. On days when we're all working on chores at the same time or are all at the table with busy hands but available ears, I'll check my list to see what's next and start a playlist. If we don't finish the playlist before it's time to move on to something else, I make a note of where we stopped and we pick it up again the next day we have time. The only one that doesn't always fit into the schedule as neatly is Composer Study. If the scheduled composer study for the week is listening to the composer's music on Spotify, we often do that during dinner instead of during the school day, so we might listen to a bit of it every night.

We're a few weeks into our second term of the year, and I love the loop schedules. If we're home and at the table, we always have a bit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful to share together. If all goes as planned, I'll share our listening loop playlists over the next week or two.