"Morning" Time so far...

This year I am teaching 7th, 5th, 3rd, 1st, Preschool, and I have a newborn. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it's a lot right now. It's a strange combination of so hard and so good. I'll update another time with our "morning time" plans, because that is really the best part of everything we're doing this year.

For this post, we'll just show some of what we've finished so far.

I'm doing my best to pre-read many of Fritter's school books. Partly to keep up with him so we can discuss things, but also partly to educate myself. I so wish I had been taught this way! So the above notebooks are mine and show some of the work I've done so far. The top is my commonplace. I just had to capture the quote shown from Lion in the Gateway {click to enlarge}. So appropriate to our times, for sure. The next notebook is my timeline. Fritter has a similar one this year that he is starting.

View from the couch on a typical school day. Nursing baby, 1st grader and preschooler doing some cutting and gluing of shapes, mess. It's all good.

One thing I've added this year is what I'm calling "group work". For most people, I'm guessing this would be just a part of their morning time, but a super involved morning time doesn't work for us this year, so I've sort of spread the work out over the day. Group work happens after lunch and recess, starting around 1. Honestly, this is becoming all of our favorite parts of the day and I am doing my best not to skip it. We look forward so much to it!

One resource we are using is Nature Drawing and Journaling. It's a guided Nature Journaling book and though we've only completed one lesson so far, it's been a hit. Here are our first entries.

Hard at work on our journals.

We are continuing with our Shakespeare memory work using Ken Ludwig's book. This year we're working on Romeo and Juliet. Froggy and Sunflower act the balcony scene out daily.

Memory work and our read aloud do happen in the morning, right after our walk. This morning, our read aloud time went a bit long. I just can't say no to requests for "Just one more chapter!" Especially when we are so close to finishing the book. During the read aloud, the children work on either a coloring page (usually the saint of the day from our various coloring books) or their drawing lessons. Here is what they worked on today.

We finished Big John's Secret today.

Learning to draw faces.

Lessons from the Drawing Textbook.

We are studying birds this year in Apologia Science and so Sunflower is learning to draw birds.

Froggy worked on his coloring page from Our 24 Family's Ways, which we use during Morning Prayer Time.

Today our Group Work was completing our Meet the Masters study of Georgia O'Keefe. We started Track B last year and are finishing up, and hope to complete Track C this year.

Morning Time is our favorite part of the school day. It's a time for us all to come together, no matter how much "school" we have left to complete. Attitudes are quickly changed, and the whole atmosphere of the house becomes one of joyful learning and being together. I'm hoping to remember how important this time is later in the year when I start to get hung up on checking all the boxes!