This year we started school the first full week of August, so we are now in week 2! I thought this week I would share what we are doing for Morning Time together in this season of our homeschool. During most of the school year, my son will be at a full day enrichment program every Tuesday, so we will only have 4 mornings together at home. Thus, I made sure to plan a four day schedule, and that is what I will be sharing today. Our routine consists of 4 basic areas, as follows:
Prayer and Bible Reading
This is the devotional portion of our time together each morning. We open with reading a prayer together, and for this term I chose the Collect for Grace from The Book of Common Prayer. Following this, we go over our verses from our Scripture Memory Box. Then I read a Psalm or Proverb portion from the Year 9 Bible schedule, which the kids take turns narrating. There are only 3 of these reading per week, so on the fourth day, we are going through a chapter or so of W. Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. I read this book several years ago and learned a lot from it, and I thought the kids were old enough to get something out of it, too. We end the devotional portion of Morning Time by singing our hymn for the month.
Loop Subject One
This section is for one of our AmblesideOnline “riches” subjects, which include Artist Study, Composer Study, a Shakespeare play, and one of Plutarch’s Lives. This first term of the year our artist is Camille Pissarro, and we are especially excited to study him now because our local art museum will be hosting a Pissarro exhibit beginning at the end of October…perfect timing! I love getting to see the real pieces in person after we have studied them, and it is a rare treat, indeed!
Our composer is Frederick Delius, who I actually had never heard of before, which is something for a former music major to admit. It is always good to learn new things, though! The Shakespeare play we are reading this term is Coriolanus (my son and I have actually watched this one on screen in the past) because our homeschool group is syncing up our Shakespeare plays this year. Marcus Cato (the Elder) is the life we are reading in Plutarch, which is both interesting and confusing since we read Cato the Younger at the end of last school year!
Singing and Poetry
This third segment of Morning Time gives us a little break between loop subjects. This is when we sing our monthly folk song from the AmblesideOnline rotation, read our daily poetry selections from each student’s term poet (Rudyard Kipling and Alexander Pope, this term), and work on poems for memory/recitation.
Loop Subject Two
Finally, we have our second loop subject for the day, which will end our Morning Time rotation. This is a somewhat reworked rotation piece for us, although most years we did have two loop subjects. The thing that is a little different from other years is that I got more creative with my choices for three of the four days and picked some things that would add a little lightheartedness into our mornings together. Often in the past, the second loop subject has been a studious subject, like grammar, dictation, or a foreign language lesson.
This year, we are reading a chapter from Heroes of Asgard one day (a recent addition to the AO schedule that neither of my kids have read before) and a chapter from My Family and Other Animals (for nature lore/study) another day. If we happen to finish Heroes of Asgard before the end of the year, I intend to fill that reading spot with another collection of folk tales yet to be determined. Gerald Durrell’s book is a great, funny book that makes a good read aloud since there are some spots that may want a bit of content editing on the fly.
For art lessons, something we have always, always struggled with in terms of consistent execution, I decided to take advantage of our local library’s digital offerings and use the access we have to the art, craft, and design classes available on CreativeBug.com. My daughter is especially interested in following the tutorials offered there, whereas my son is not as enthusiastic about them at this point. We may move this particular subject to the days when he is not home, since it can be pretty time-intensive, and because at this juncture, I don’t believe it is necessary to force him to take art classes.
The final loop subject for this portion is mapwork and timeline entries. Each student has a focus area for them to work on, usually involving doing both map drills on Seterra and labelling blank paper maps from a map key. We choose one or two persons (or sometimes important events) from their history readings or from our other loop subjects, to enter into their timeline books. It’s not a full-on Book of Centuries, but I have never been able to figure out how to make that happen. For us, it is enough to be aware of when people lived in time.
Keeping Track of it All
In order to keep track of where we are in the loops, what exact painting, songs, readings, etc., we are studying each day and week, I have created a couple of things to help me. First, I made a printed outline to go in my teacher binder to remind me what we are doing over the course of the term. I also made a less detailed version for each of the kids have in their own binders in case they also wanted to follow along. I am attaching each of these as PDFs at the end of this post in case they would be helpful to anyone else in their planning.
I also created a Trello board with checklists for each day of the week, each with specific links to the resources we will be using for subjects that are available online. So that you can see exactly how I set this board up, I have created a copy of my personal board and made it public for anyone to view. I think you should be able to copy it to your own Trello account: 2025-26 Morning Time Board Example. Be aware that it is maybe a little rough in spots because I edit these on the fly to adapt to the length of readings as we go. But it is a really precise picture of what we do in Morning Time, and it might save you time in creating your own cards and checklists, just plugging in your own unique subjects.
Alright, homeschooling friends, that is all I have for you today! I hope as you begin this new school year (if you are using a more traditional calendar, that is) you have the peace of the Lord and excitement about learning alongside your children this year!
Until next time, happy homeschooling!
Kiel
