One of the hallmarks of our home education journey has been our steady use of Morning Time in our homeschool. Today I’d like to share how I include my teens in this intentional daily gathering time.
Morning Time or as we like to call it, Morning Basket is a way to start the day in your homeschool and gives everyone in the family a chance to connect with each other before heading off to their other daily schedules and lessons.
Morning Time with Teens
Our Morning Time lessons are created with the idea in mind that if this were the only thing we accomplished in a homeschooling day, we would have an enriching experience sharing some time together and learning from excellent literature and about our faith.
What’s in Our Morning Basket
- Morning Prayers
- Current Family Read-Aloud
- Poetry & Memory Work
- Art & Music Appreciation
- Nature Study
We don’t do all of these categories every day but block them in so we can cover a little bit of each throughout the week. The main component is our morning prayers and our current family read-aloud.
Teen Participation
When I was schooling all four of our children at the same time, morning basket time was a given. As they started getting older and transitioning to the high school years, we also gave the older kids a choice to participate if they wanted to.
Most of the time, they trickled in and out during our morning time but were regularly excited to be part of the discussion and of course prayer time.
Teens like to sleep, hence morning time doesn’t have to always happen early in the day. Conducting a lively and engaging Morning Basket around the lunch table has afforded us to still be together without the stress of always waiting for someone to get up and come to the table.
Mixing up the different topics covered during Morning Time will ensure that the teens stay interested as well. Right now I’m only schooling one teen, my 15-year-old son, and his younger brother our 12-year-old. So our topics and read-aloud selections tend to revolve around their interests, which can vary depending on what time of year it is.
This gives me the flexibility to tailor our time spent together on the best possible resources and ideas.
Teens offer an interesting bit of themselves to our time spent on a common theme that isn’t always prevalent with the younger set. And at the same time allows the younger kids to learn from their older siblings. It’s a winning combination that has greatly blessed our homeschool days.
Do you do morning time with your teens??
