Morning Time Q&A 1

I thought I would take a post not on the schedule to answer a few questions that have come up. Hopefully, I can do this a couple of times during the month.  Some things, of course, are scheduled later in the month.  I have planned out in advance all 31 posts although I have not written them all yet. Some questions will be answered as we go but others I will answer in these Q&A posts so feel free to ask away.

(I am a bit hurried this morning so please excuse any errors. I will not be able to fix them until later this evening.)

Question:

What kind of schedule to you recommend for starting the morning?

Answer:

Years ago we tried to start MT at 8:30 every morning. In those days we woke up around 6:00 A.M. and sometimes earlier.  That was a good plan but not perfect. The fatal flaw was that if we did not start at 8:30 I was tempted to throw up my hands and cancel MT. MT got cancelled often under that plan.

These days we sleep in later.  I let the kids wake up naturally, making sure they do not stay up too late at night. I have found that helps attitudes.  Tired people are grumpy people and you can imagine how awful a houseful of grumpy boys could be.

Waking up early is good but not necessary.  I would NEVER have children sitting around waiting for MT. They should wake up and go through whatever normal routine you have and then begin their own schoolwork until MT begins.

Morning Time is its own routine but it does not have to start at the same time each day. It is much more likely to take place if you just start it when you can without worrying about the time. I have been known to start MT as late as 11:30 or  even in the afternoon.  Morning is definitely better but it is never too late.

The first point is keep the starting time fluid so that you never feel too overwhelmed to start.
The second point is to make sure the children are busy until MT starts whenever that is.

For years our morning schedule was: rise, have devotions, eat breakfast, do chores, start math until MT.  Now it is similar only the boys have daily schedules which they work through on their own in their own way until I call "Morning Meeting in 5 minutes." 

Question:


How do you promote discussion in MT?

Answer:

First I would suggest that you read through my old Morning Time page, especially the posts that give sample days.  I also plan to post a couple of new sample days throughout this series.

Discussion is tricky especially if you are keeping in mind my advice not to moralize or spiritualize. MT discussion can quickly deteriorate into Mom's Sermon Time. This is the biggest MT no-no.

So how do you promote this sort of discussion without being heavy-handed?

Play it by ear. You will be surprised by the connections that come up naturally in MT. If you have a child who likes to ask questions, run with those questions and try to be a bit Socratic about it. That is keep the questions relating to more questions. Be encouraging to your children when they ask questions. It helps if MT runs along without too many interruptions BUT there are times when one discussion will take over and become the heart and soul of that particular MT and you should be brave enough to kiss the rest of the MT goodbye.

On the other, hand you may have a child who is so inquisitive that he will ruin MT daily if you let him. Do not be afraid of stifling some of that.

You cannot have deep discussions about every single aspect of MT every day and you should not. 
When you are reading something difficult such as Plutarch or Shakespeare or even the Bible, you can pause to ask the kids what they think is meant by certain phrases or sentences. This is a great way to promote discussion.

Oral narrations can also lead to discussion as you encourage the children.

Times of prayer can lead to good theological discussions in context. Why is baby David so sick?  How is this family handling this hard time?  How can we help them?

Hard vocabulary words can lead to great discussions.

Sometimes I will read something and just ask upfront, ahead of time, what the kids know about something. This week before we read a poem by Tennyson titled Ulysses, I asked the boys what they knew about Ulysses. I am always shocked by how much they know about things I have never taught them.  Then we used what we knew to look for things in the poem that related to those preknown things. That helped a lot as otherwise the poem was a bit obscure.

I will try to add other discussions we have during MT to my future posts to give you a picture. On the one hand MT needs to roll along but on the other hand it needs to be able to accommodate some discussion each day.


Feel free to ask questions related to this post in the comments or you can leave questions for future posts.

Morning Meeting

Day 4~

 

Let's start with the mundane.  Daily life. Family structure. Habits. Plans. Focus. 

Morning Time (MT) at our house begins with Morning Meeting. Think of this as the announcements at church. 

Sometime during the morning I call out, "10 minutes till Morning Meeting."  At this point the kids start finishing the chapters and lessons they have been working on all morning from their daily school lists. I let them work on those lists however they like just so they finish the list each day. 

I call out MM and then I get busy and forget but eventually I say, "Everyone on the couch for Morning Meeting."  These days that is just Andrew and Alex but once upon a time it meant 9 people gathered around: high school students, middle-schoolers, elementary, kindergartners, toddlers and babies.  With that many lives to juggle, and often only one car, it was imperative that we touch base on everyone's plans for the day.

In fact, because of having so many people, I learned that the only thing that really matters is what we need to do TODAY.  Tomorrow is another day. I will deal with that tomorrow. Of course, sometimes it helps to talk about tomorrow but there is no reason at all to talk about the day after tomorrow; each day has enough trouble of its own. 

This is the time I ask the children about certain habits that are important to me but not, apparently, to them.  

"Did you brush your teeth? Go do it then."  

"What did you read in your devotions?"

My mothering intuition has reached the stage where I rarely have to wait for answers to any question. I can read pauses.  I can say "no" 10 minutes before I am asked a question.

Alex often says, "I wish you hadn't had so many boys before me."  When it comes to boys there is nothing new under the sun. Poor Alex doesn't stand a chance but at least he has learned to laugh about it.

During the MM part of Morning Time we discuss our day, the use of the car and any unusual events. I may bring up something that has been bothering me like people going to bed at night without straightening up or bathroom hygiene, although for all my bragging about motherly skill, I still don't know how to keep the boys' bathroom clean or what to do with toddlers.  The good news is that even lots and lots of toddlers, say 9 of them, grow up and then sadly there is nothing funny to talk about with your husband as you drift off to sleep each night, that is until your grandchildren start saying funny things.  

My son recently told me how his wife had left him in charge of the boys while shopping and by the time he noticed they were being super quiet they had emptied every single food item in their pantry onto the floor. When his wife came home he sent them all out to the beach while he cleaned the kitchen for several hours.  Isn't that the cutest toddler story?  Toddlers are adorable, you just don't feel it until you don't have any. 

Sometimes we go to Sam's Club early in the morning and inevitably someone comes on the loud speaker and says, "Time for Morning Meeting."   We all smile. We know how important it is to discuss the mundane daily needs of a business or a family and for mom (the boss) to communicate standards of behavior and outline habits or just find out what is going on.

Often when there is no time for the full-fledged Morning Time, we still have Morning Meeting. My dad was a baseball coach and very organized man. He loves our MM and often calls and asks how it went. I feel guilty if I have to say we skipped it; he always sounds so disappointed.


Suggestion of the Day for Morning Time Memory:

This is our current memory piece from Shakespeare's Macbeth. I highly recommend learning one passage from each Shakespeare play studied.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.  

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

Other 31 Day Friends:

What to do in Morning Time

Day 3~

• Bible Reading
• Doctrinal Books
• Christian Living
• Intercessory Prayer
• Worship
• Catechisms
• Bible Memorization
• Bible Memorization Review
• Hymn Singing (Memorization and Review)
• Psalm Singing
• Chorus Singing
• Folk Song Singing
• Hygiene
• Manners
• Language Memorization*
• Reading about Composers (Opal Wheeler?)
• Listening to Composer Selections
• Choral Works in small doses using the Libretto
• Artist Studies
• Artist Biographies (Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin ?)
• Poetry for Memorization (New and Review)
• Poetry for discussion
• Miscellaneous Memory such as speeches, Bill of Rights,  etc.
• Plutarch
• Shakespeare
• Nature Notebooks
• Drawing
• Grammar discussion
• Diagramming Sentences
• Discussing Sentences
• Civics Questions and Answers
• Presidents 
• States and Capitals Discussions
• Reading Aloud: History, Humor, Literature, Science, etc.  (Read books that you all will love during this time. This year I dropped a book which we dreaded and added in Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy . We are loving Science Matters. I highly recommend it for the Jr. High and High School.)

Any subject which you can study in short lessons. For instance you could study the constellations in MT by looking at one a day in a book and discussing it for just a few minutes. 

You could even work on math problem a day on the white board. The beauty of that sort of quick learning is learning how to think through problems together. They can see you working through it too. This happens to me all the time while we are doing our sentence diagramming which, by the way, has become my favorite part of MT.  I cannot begin to tell you how hard won that battle with grammar has been for me. Slow and steady wins the race and I am not dead yet.

Some of this you will want to do every single day of every single year. Some of it will come and go, like Civics or Astronomy.

Each day you will have many opportunities for discussion. You won't be able to have long discussions every day at every point but each day there will be some discussion. The neat thing is you never know where it will be.  We will talk more about this later.

*This is a category which must be used with caution. Memorization is good and a good portion of MT is used for it BUT memorization loses its value as it is divorced from meaning or at least the grasp for meaning. We may not know what Hey, diddle, diddle means but our minds at least grasp for it. Latin chants should cause us to do that and if they do not then we need to put them aside or teach them in context. MT is not for Poll Parrots.  I would never waste valuable morning time on meaningless (to the child) information.

One of my favorite things about MT is hearing the children make connections. This morning we read Tennyson's Ulysses and I asked the kids to tell me what they knew about Ulysses so we could look for those things in the poem. Alex told a long story about how he dressed up like a beggar and shot an arrow defeated the suitors. He had remembered that from his own reading.  Sometimes I ask about things I don't think the kids will know about at all but they do know and that is super fun. I don't and should not be making the connections for them. MT sets up connections and it is always better to let them make their own.


Suggestion of the Day for Morning Time Memory:

Heidelberg Catechism Question #1:

What is your only comfort in life and death?

That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by His Holy Spirit He also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him. 

What is Morning Time and Why Bother?

Day 2~

 

Over the years I have become suspect of grand schemes especially when it comes to homeschooling. How many times have you read a glowing review of a new product only to find that the family had only just started using it or even worse mom was just planning on using it? How many times have you heard moms talk about quitting something after using it for only 2 weeks?

In our home Morning Time gradually grew out of my own reading and thinking. It is closely tied to a Charlotte Mason education because it grew out of my reading of For the Children's Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School. Later when Ambleside Online was born I seamlessly incorporated their suggestions into what I was already doing in Morning Time. That was an instance where a product, albiet a free one, and a philosophy met perfectly because they had both grown from the same seed.

But while many of the suggestions on Ambleside Online fit into the puzzle of our lives many, many other suggestions and ideas from other sources did not. This often perplexed me. Moms were glowing about the next new thing and I was plugging away at my daily liturgy called Morning Time. I could try the new thing but then I would have to quit Morning Time. I sometimes spent the summer months trying to work out the puzzle so that I could fit in the new thing or co-op or unit study with Morning Time. Guess what? I never could.

In all my years of homeschooling, I only quit having Morning Time once. The next summer I found out I had life-threatening cancer. I immediately knew one thing: Morning Time was the only part of our school that mattered. To this day, in spite of the many very bad academic years of school, the only real regret I have is the year without Morning Time (MT).

All of this was a matter of faith without sight. I was trusting my instincts, and Charlotte Mason's, while all around me moms were trying this and that and being tossed about by every wind of change. I was tossed too but MT saved me from making too many bad decisions.

And so minute by minute the years piled up along with the poems and Bible passages, the read-alouds, the discussions, and the collective family consciousness.

That is what MT is. It is the daily collection of little grains of time that add up to a lifetime of learning.  It is the daily sowing of the seeds of learning for the long haul. MT is not about reaping a quick harvest of spinach or lettuce after a few cool weeks. MT is about faithfully tending an orchard over long, long years knowing that the future harvest will be far more valuable than any quick crop. Maybe it isn't even an orchard-this is homeschool carbon which will produce a harvest of diamonds for those who have the patience and the courage to go for the long prize.

I don't walk by faith about MT anymore. Faith has become sight. I know it works. Now that my days are numbered and my time is short I love waking up every morning to spend time with Alex and Andrew-reading and talking and singing and memorizing.

Over the years, MT has kept the same structure but it can also be fluid as to categories. I think it is a great place to put all those categories which fall outside the usual school routine: composer study, artists, Plutarch and Shakespeare, even nature notebooks are each perfect for MT because these are the important things that often get squeezed out of the traditional school day. We may even find when we scoot over just a couple minutes a day to make room for these easily neglected areas the connections the mind begins to make start circuits for our children which far surpass the mundane teaching of subjects.

Tomorrow I will publish a list of possible Morning Time categories to help you get a picture of what MT looks like.

Suggestion of the Day for Morning Time Memory:

Here is a poem for young and old. My husband loves to say this one at this time of year.

The Mist and All

by Dixie Willson

I like the fall
The mist and all
I like the night owl’s lonely call
And wailing sound
Of wind around

I like the gray
November day
And dead, bare boughs that coldly sway
Against my pane

I like the rain

I like to sit
And laugh at it
And tend my cozy fire a bit
I like the fall
The mist and all

Morning Time-A Liturgy of Love

Day 1~

Morning Time? 

Longtime readers know that this is the name of the liturgy of love our family fell into 25 years ago. 

The unique thing, I think, is that we just kept plodding along all of these years until one day I realized, because the children started telling me, that Morning Time was where most of the learning took place during their childhoods.

Just this morning, as I talked over Skype to my oldest son in Japan he told me how he planned to start videotaping his own Morning Time for his 4 little boys to use while he is deployed and then he began to recite "If you can keep your head..." and when he faltered I joined in with the missing words and when I paused my youngest yelled to us from another room with the missing words and we ended together, "You'll be a man, my son,"  and there they were my son, the man, planning his own liturgy of love, and my son, the little boy, giving joy and purpose to our continuing liturgy.

My oldest and my youngest about 7 years ago.

For the next 31 days I hope to carefully spell out how you can create this lasting liturgy in your home. I hope this series will be fresh-with illustrations from my family, past and present, and even a bit of hope for the future.

Suggestion of the Day for Morning Time Memory:

IF 

By

Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

You can find many, many more 31 Days posts at The Nesting Place
You can also read :
Mystie's 31 Days of Homeschool Organization 
Cheryl's 31 Days of Home Celebration
Brandy will also be joining in.

Hanging Angels By Neill Edward Calabro

Hanging Angels By Neill Edward Calabro

I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 70s. I moved to Central Florida during the time of busing. I remember going to school for the first time and being asked, “Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?”  I didn’t have a clue.  I am not exactly sure what busing accomplished in the South. Before busing I walked to a mixed race school, in fact I walked to school with two children, a brother and a sister, and they were black.  After busing, I could no longer walk to school. School was now far away.

My mother made my brother and me ride the bus to make a point.  I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t notice that we were the only white children on the bus. Not sure her point was made. We have two hilarious family photos of my brother. One of him as the only little white boy, and he was as white and blond as possible, at a black child’s birthday party and the other with the reverse. 

All that to say that I enjoy the genre that explores that not so long ago, tumultuous time period.

I love southern literature. I love Faulkner who captures the people so well. I love Harper Lee and her Book. I love Walker Percy, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Pat Conroy,and even Fannie Flagg. 

In fact, If you like any of these you may also like the new novel about the south in the 1960s and before: Hanging Angels by Neill Edward Calabro.

This is a book full of the rich imagery of the times. In fact, it had its start as a movie script and that explains much of the rich imagery that has you seeing the book as you read. It is full of scattered diamonds of prose, and some truly inspiring originality. How did the author come up with these ideas?

“With a willowy seasonal change in the landscape, moving the calendar to another month, an ominous magnolia tree sits at the edge of an acre by crossing dirt roads.”  Ominous, indeed! In some ways this novel is the story of what happened at that ominous tree.

It is a truly unique look at racism which asks the question, and leaves you with the question: What if we couldn’t tell what color someone was?

Because for the white Pine family race is going insert itself into their lives without their permission and we are going to find out just what kind of man Jefferson Pine is. It begins with a little boy(white? black?) with a scar around his neck and ends 30 years later with a courtroom drama.

It has moments of darkness reminding me of Flannery O’Connor and moments of whimsy reminding me of Walker Percy. 

Hanging Angels is a new novel in the southern Gothic tradition reminding us that color is not always so easy to discern.

Documents and Speeches for Memorization

Documents Memorized

The Declaration of Independence (Through “He has…”)

The Bill of Rights

Gettysburg Address

The War Inevitable by Patrick Henry

We Shall Fight by Winston Churchill

The Apostles Creed

The Nicene Creed

The Heidelberg Catechism Question 1

Contemplate by Sam Adams

These Are the Times that Try by Thomas Paine

States and Capitals

Planets

Presidents

Continents and Oceans Song

Heidelberg Catechism question #1 “What is your only comfort…?”

West Point Cadet’s Prayer

U.S. Oath of Citizenship