Day in the Life . . . {Morning Time}

Can I just say I'm giddy? Giddy as a school girl. Or giddy as a homeschool mom can be some days (or lots of days as the case is right now). Seriously! Can I just shout it from the rooftops? This home education gig rocks my world!

These last fifteen minutes I've been cleaning up the lunch dishes while the three oldest kiddos have been immersed in an educational task. And they are EATING IT UP! And I'm eating it up just listening to them. Really, I'd love to just forget the dishes and join them. Not this time but we'll do it again sometime when the dishes are done.

What is this task you ask? I'll tell you soon but for now, I must go in order of this little series.  I left off telling you that you are invited to be a fly on our wall for a bit. We left off with "Morning Time."

Morning Time. 

Now to be honest, "Morning Time" has been sporadic since we've had the leg breakages. Our schedule has been thrown off in a number of ways but I'm not stressing over it. We adapt it to the given day and I'm confident we'll get back on the horse. When Nutmeg gets her cast off, that will help tremendously. Still, our schedule will be flexing to meet Mace's new rising time. But yeah, that's homeschooling life. The needs and situation is always in a state of flex, so one has to access the changes and adapt routines accordingly. For now though, we seem to be doing fine.

Morning Time. We basically are working on a number of items from varying academic disciplines that we are committing to memory. Here's the general order:


The week's verse. I usually pull this from the Sunday's readings. That way I feel they are better prepared (and anticipatory) when they listen to the Scripture readings on Sunday. More importantly, I hope this practice will eventually help them internalize what they learn in church and bring into their everyday lives (and mine as well!).

Books of the Bible. Right now the boys (and Nutmeg is she desires) are memorizing the books of the Bible. They are just about finished with the Old Testament books. At this point they might mess up once or need help once. We decided that we'll continue with the OT books for another week or so until it is completely cemented in our minds. Then we'll move onto the New Testament books.

Shakespeare. We work on whatever play and passage we happen to be on. So far we've memorized one longer passage and two smaller ones from A Midsummer's Night Dream. More on Shakespeare in a moment.

After these three items we choose from either: math fact flash cards, Latin flashcards, or counting (for example: 2's, 3's, 4's, 5's, etc.)

These next two don't tend to happen every single day due to baby needs: Mace!

Geography. We head to the kitchen table for a little map work. The three children take out their geography binders which have a blank copy of a map of the United States and each continent of the world on separate pages. We color in one state and then the boys and I write in the name of the state and the name of the capital. We also choose a country of the world to color and label. On days that we don't do our geography notebooks, we quiz Nutmeg on the countries of the world. The kids all say the states and capitals together.

My hope has been to check out some picture books from the library about the states and countries we memorize but I have to say we haven't done a great job in this yet. Working on it! Always something to work on!

Read Aloud. I have a list of classic books I'd like to read aloud this year. If we don't get to this time at the end of Morning Time, I try to find time to read it at breakfast, lunch, or in the afternoon. Admittedly, this is the one item that I find extremely important but is often difficult to squeeze in. If it is an easier book like "Winnie-the-Pooh" that we are reading (for Nutmeg's benefit) it is no problem to fit but if it is a little more difficult book like "The Moffats," which we are reading now, I find it more difficult to find a good time to read aloud.

After we memorize some of these selections, I'll reevaluate what items we should be memorizing and move on to something else. I will move the items we have already learned after a tab in my Morning Time binder called "Review" and we'll pick something to review every day. I'm thinking that after we finish "A Midsummer Night's Dream" we will move onto some poetry for a while.

That's morning time. It has been a fruitful addition to our academic routine this year. Let me expound for a minute our what we have been doing for our Shakespeare studies.  What a unexpected thrill this year!!

More about Shakespeare . . . 

A couple of various methods of education highly recommend Shakespeare as a separate academic area. I do wish I had time to share why this is so but unfortunately I don't have the time to at the moment. Do "google it" if you find it interesting.

Sarah from "Amongst Lovely Things" turned me on to this book called How to Teach your Children Shakespeare. Basically I just bought the book and the book walks me, as the parent(or teacher),through a simple process of learning Latin together as a family. Mr. Ken Ludwig begins the book telling us why learning Shakespeare is such a valuable area of education. In the next short section he shows us how. The best way, he says, to learn Shakespeare is to memorize it. The language is difficult. When you memorize a passage of Shakespeare you must learn it word by word, line by line. One has to understand each word and phrase. When we learn it, we own it.



That is what is happening to our family. We are engaging Shakespeare. It rocks!  We are memorizing it and it is thrilling! I see that we are becoming more at ease with the language. Granted, we probably won't be reading the entire play for several years now but it will be much easier, I think, when we do, to appreciate it so much more. In addition, at this point I am not talking about the deeper meanings of Shakespeare's play. We are simply becoming familiar with the plot, characters, and some specific passages. In time, God willing, we will read entire plays and talk through deeper meanings.

To begin this year we checked out and read several picture books about Shakespeare and the Globe theatre from our library system. I read the first chapters from Mr. Ludwig's book about the first couple passages we were to memorize from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I printed off the passage pages from Mr. Ludwig's website and put them in my "Morning Time" binder. Each morning, the kids and I talk through a line of the passage. We talk about what it means and then we practice it. Easy peasy. Even for a regular mom like myself.

We have found this splendid picture book rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It seems to be an excellent retelling of the play. It has helped us tremendously understand and enjoy the plot. So much so that fairies and certain passages of Shakespeare are entering the playtime hours!



I searched youtube for what I considered to be a good version of the played onstage. I have yet to find one I like (not that I am some sort of an expert) but I am pleased with the 1935 film version. Actually, youtube had a snippet of the very first passage that we memorized! Oh, how excited the kids were to watch it! I told them we would watch the whole movie after we memorized all our passages (five, a few are shorter).  Oh man, I am WEAK! Today I started playing it at lunchtime and just couldn't push stop!! They watched 45 minutes of it before we turned it off. And that is what they were relishing while I washed dishes.

I just can't wait until we watch the entire thing as a family. The next passage we'll memorize is by Nick Bottom after he wakes up from having a "dream" about having his head turn into an ass's head and being pursued by a lovesick fairy! Fun times!!