Now that I am educating three teens, our Morning Time looks totally different than when I was schooling three elementary age students. I have always loved doing Morning Time. It has been the anchor to my day for 9 years now and I can’t imagine not having it be a part of our daily rhythm. I know that many teens opt out of Morning Time so that they can carry on with their work schedule and I have given my teens that option but they have always denied the offer. I have to say that that makes my heart sing.
As I said above, Morning Time looks radically different now that I have teens. It’s just reading now. I tried to sneak a game into the rhythm but was asked to take it out because they just have time for the readings. I was okay with that.
Morning Time now has been scaled down to just two readings with the whole group and then I continue on with one reading with just Emma. I think of it as block scheduling; I do one reading from a book or we do an activity that is considered Fine Arts and then we do a Humanities reading. That’s it! We do our Bible reading first thing in the morning before we start school but we have moved Morning Time to right after lunch. I know, technically, it isn’t Morning Time but I don’t know what else to call it. Symposium just sounds too stuffy for farmers. (insert wink.)
When we started school 5 weeks ago, we had to do some Morning Time housekeeping, meaning we had to finish up with some readings that we had left off at the beginning of the summer. So in September we finished off Othello and read a chapter of a math book that I am finding quite fascinating; The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life by Marcus Du Sautoy. We will only read one chapter at a time as it gets it a bit dense to read the whole book in one chunk.
Now we are starting some new books and activities for the next month. First, for the Fine Arts section of MT we will be doing picture study with Mary Cassatt’s paintings for a week, then we will do a week on poetry. I haven’t decided on which poet to focus on but I am leaning towards Luci Shaw. Then we will read a natural history book, entitled The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. For the Humanities portion we will be reading Are You Liberal? Conservative? or Confused? written by Richard Maybury. That will take us to the end of October, for the month of November I’m not sure yet what we will do, either we will read the next chapter in The Number Mysteries book or we will do a theology book. I am thinking for theology we will read The Creed in Slow Motion by Reverend Ronald Knox. This is a series of sermons based on the Apostles Creed. Rev. Knox takes the Creed, clause by clause and speaks on each section. It is an excellent book but I’m not sure if my 13 yr. old will be able to grasp it all. I could always read it now and then revisit it when she is 17. A thought.
So this plan will take us to December. Have I said before how much I enjoy Morning Time?
Rooted in Deep 