Wednesday, September 17, 2008

What is Morning Time?

Approximately 20 years ago as a result of my early home school adventures and the reading of For the Children’s Sake (Susan Schaeffer Macaulay) followed by The Original Home school Series by Charlotte Mason, I began a morning meeting with my children as a way to incorporate subjects that were important to me but easily lost in the shuffle of conventional schooling.

Over the years I continued to add to this time so that it eventually made up about 2 hours of our morning. As my older boys graduated and flew away they often returned and encouraged me that the most important things they had learned while growing up had been in MT. MT became our daily family colloquy. In was a way to bring all my educational philosophies to the table. It was a way to incorporate poetic knowledge into the hearts of my children. It was a way to share my faith and even preach a sermon every single day.

With the advent of the Internet I shared the idea with a wider group of people. Over the years various mothers have used the idea in one form or another calling it all sorts of things. The idea is not especially brilliant only extremely practical. As a matter of fact this idea has been around long before I came along so I don’t take credit for it at all. I just like to promote it!

Our MT looks in bare bones form looks like this:

Gather together. Talk about the day.

Discuss our artist and composer playing in the background.

Take prayer requests. Pray.

Sing a new hymn we are learning and review and old one.

Read the Proverb for the day.

Review an old Bible verse and work on our new passage.

Read a bit in Plutarch (because older students are still participating)

Read a bit in Shakespeare.

Older students leave.

Use Bible study guide of some sort to read through the Bible.

Review and recite new and old poems. Discuss

Review and recite new and old documents. Discuss

Listen to folk songs and try to sing along.

Discuss one President of the USA each day.

Read Aloud generally 3 books.

1 comment:

austen_n_burney said...

What bible study guides have you found helpful? I am just starting w/ a five year old. What kind of books do you read aloud? Picture books? Chapter books? Thank you for all of this info!