The Magic of Morning Time

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Today I'm going to be talking about one of the most nourishing practices that I've used in my homeschool, and that is the concept of morning time. I know a lot of you are probably familiar with this term already, but hopefully, I'm going to be able to give you some more background on the different components of morning time and why they're so important to include in your homeschool. Perhaps, I may be able to give you some new ideas of things you can incorporate into your morning time. If this is not a practice that you've done consistently, maybe this episode will give you the encouragement that you need to get started. Just to give you a little background, I did not start off doing morning time when I first started homeschooling. Our mornings were very chaotic, to say the least. I didn't really know how to start school in a way that would bring everybody together, that would bring order and calmness to the start of our days. Most days started with me crawling out of bed in the mornings because the baby was crying, my older kids were fighting, or any number of things that aren't really great things to be woken up to. I did not have my own morning routine. I would just wake up when I needed to. That created a lot of chaos already to start the day because I was already not in a good mood, and my kids didn't know what to do with themselves in the morning. Every day, it just kind of felt different. No day really had any kind of routine and structure. Then we would just start school as I was feeding the baby. I was running around doing all of the things, trying to get some chores done, trying to get kids started, and I felt like I was pulling teeth most mornings. 

I once heard a homeschool speaker say that you should start your day off with the subject that's the hardest, because in the morning your brain is the most fresh. You just start with the subject that you know is difficult, and for most people that is math. So, I started off with my school age children when we first started homeschooling doing math at first, and of course there was resistance. Of course it was really hard to get a rhythm and a start to our day. It dawned on me at one point that it would be the equivalent of someone handing me a mop the minute I woke up in the morning and saying, “Okay, Julie, now it's time to mop the floor because mopping the floors is your least favorite chore.” I do not like mopping the floors. If every morning I was greeted with, “Oh, because you're fresh and you're awake now, let's do the thing you really don't like,” I would probably crawl back in bed and pull the covers up. I definitely would resist and not really have the best attitude about having to start my day with mopping the floor. It dawned on me that that was what I was doing to my school-aged children by trying to start school with math first. I really wanted to come up with a different way, and I started singing in the morning. I started having a song that would bring all of us to the table in the morning, and I started bringing the little ones with us. It became a family thing that included even the toddlers, which led to them not interrupting as much, because they didn’t feel isolated.

This term “morning time,” wasn't actually a thing. I was calling it circle time because I used to teach kindergarten, so it was just this basic idea of let's start our day with a song, or with a story. I have to admit, I was a little kindergarten teacher-ish, and we would do the calendar time and say the pledge and do that kind of thing, but it was a much better way to start our day. Then this term of morning time became more and more popular, and more and more people were talking about it. Then, as I started diving into Charlotte Mason's volumes, she didn't use morning time. I started realizing that some of the subjects that she did include in her programs really would fit well in morning time. When we were all together as a family, we could start our day with things that are good and true and beautiful. I'm going to unpack some of the things that we include in our morning time, explain some of the neuroscience about why those are good subjects to include, and what those do to your children and your brain in the mornings to prepare you for learning. 

Charlotte Mason said “education is an atmosphere and a discipline and a life.” The practice of morning time really does incorporate these three tools. One, it helps you make the atmosphere of your home in the mornings more calm, more lovely, more beautiful. Making it a habit decreases decision fatigue about what you’re doing, and it makes things so much easier and simple. Morning time is the perfect way to bring living ideas into your homeschool. We'll talk about some of these with the different components, because it brings in that concept that education is a life.

There's always going to be more things that we want to do and include in our homeschool. Making these things your priority first thing in the morning really does make sure that they get done, instead of doing some things every once in a while. Doing them in the morning has a greater probability that those priorities are going to get covered in your day. You’ll find that when your kids know what is coming in the morning, it lessens some of that resistance that they may have to start the school day.  

Charlotte Mason said "It is not too much to say that a morning in which a child receives no new idea is a morning wasted, however closely the little student has been kept at his books." (Vol 1, pg 173). You can have them complete all their math lessons and do these different activities for these different subjects. If the children complete all their activities and lessons for the day, but have not received a new and living idea that is going to grow and shape them as a person, it's a morning wasted. It is so vital and important to have time for filling them with these beautiful ideas. This isn't a waste of time. I hear that from people all the time, this is kind of extra stuff, and hopefully, as you see through this episode, you've realized that it's not. Even if you're just starting off your morning together and you're reading the Bible for five minutes, they're getting so much living word put into them and so many new ideas put into them. That is such a great way to start your day. Even if you don't end up doing any of these other subjects, just start together with something. 

What do I include in morning time? This is not a prescription. You need to decide what's important to your family that you want to include in morning time. I'm just going to share some of the things that I include that come from some of the subjects that Charlotte Mason included in her programs and some of the neuroscience behind these subjects. 

In my opinion, the key to deciding what to include is that you want to keep morning time on the shorter side. Sometimes it can be very tempting, since we're all together, to extend morning time until lunch. You want to keep it realistic. What I do for our morning times is: we do Bible and one other thing, and we kind of rotate through what that other thing is so that morning time only lasts about 30 minutes. By then, I've noticed people's attention has started to wane and we're ready to move on and start to cover some of the other subjects in our day to make sure that those get covered as well. So, I just encourage you when you're thinking through what you want to include in your morning time to try to limit it to about 30 minutes. I include singing, composers study, picture study, recitation, poetry study, read alouds, and these can be a lot of different things. Fables and folktales are great for reading together as a family when you have multiple ages. I'm only doing these things about once a week, so it's Bible and one other thing. This other thing kind of rotates through, so I'm not trying to do all of these subjects every day, that would take way longer than 30 minutes.  

In Charlotte Mason's program, she included hymns, folk songs, and this concept is called sol-fa. Sol-fa is a way to sight read music. She taught that as well. Singing hymns, things that are important for how you worship as a family, are great to include. We have the best time learning folk songs. I like to include folk songs that have to do with the time period that we're studying. If you have little children, you can include folk songs about the different seasons. Holiday time is a great time to learn some songs. It's very interesting, some of the songs that I didn't think my kids would like are the ones that I find them singing around the house. Folk songs are just a really neat way to bring history to life. You hear what the common people were singing. Find some folk songs for what you're studying. Incorporating singing is important because singing releases endorphins. It makes you feel good to sing in the mornings. It also improves memory. Singing definitely improves memory. That's why a lot of times we learn catchy songs for things that we want to memorize and learn as well. It strengthens the temporal lobe, and the temporal lobes are a part of the brain that is one of the last to deteriorate in old age. Singing, in the way that we are processing language, stays in these temporal lobes, even if some of the rest of our memory starts to deteriorate, which is absolutely incredible. So, just decide what are some songs that would be meaningful for your family and, for how you worship or the historical time period that you're learning and sol-fa is really fun too. There are plenty of YouTube videos and lessons, if you want to teach your children how to read music by sight, which is just a really great skill to have. 

During composer study, your child is learning about one composer. Charlotte Mason had them do one composer per term. She did three 12 week terms in a year, so you're learning about three composers throughout the course of a year. You’ll want to pick about six of their popular pieces to listen to. You can find a biography about the composer on YouTube, or there are some great picture books about different composers available to read, as well. They just get some information about who this composer is, why they made the kind of music they did and when they were living. There's also a great podcast, Classics For Kids, and they have different composers. They have a biography about that composer, and then they have different podcast episodes, teaching them different musical concepts based on that composer's popular pieces. That is just a super easy way to start. If you don't have any resources for composer study, they pretty much have done it for you. Just pick somebody and start working through those podcast episodes. Learning about a composer and listening to that classical orchestra kind of music increases dopamine. Which is again, one of the feel good chemicals. It decreases blood pressure, so even if you have a crazy morning, and you're running around feeling very anxious, listening to classical music helps you calm down. It helps you relax. It takes away some of that stress for you and your children, and composer study also improves memory by listening to classical music. It has been shown to help people study and remember the things they're studying more. Again, it's helping your child's brain get ready and improving their memory for the things that they're going to be learning throughout their day, which is super cool. 

You don't have to know everything about the orchestra or that composer or music theory in order to do composer study with your children. The goal is not to have children who can give a lecture on music theory. It is to have children learn to enjoy classical music and tell one piece from another, just as naturally as they learn the difference between say The Farmer and the Dell, and When the Saints Go Marching In ,those are folk songs they are both familiar with and fond of. The more they are exposed to good literature, the better they get at reading the themes in language of literature. In art and music, the more they're simply exposed to pictures and music, the more they learn to read the themes of the world's classical compositions. You're helping to train your child's affections towards the things that are beautiful and lovely. Listening to classical music in the mornings is a great way for them to learn to appreciate beautiful music.

Another way to help them appreciate beauty is through picture study. You're going to pick one artist per term, same as a composer, so you'll have three artists for the year. Then you're going to pick about six of their popular pieces to learn about through the course of that term. Picture study is literally the simplest thing ever. You show your child a painting, put it up for all the kids to see, and have them look at it really intently. Have them look at all the detail on the painting for about a minute, and then take the painting away and have them describe what they saw. This is helping to train their affections for things that are beautiful. They have a better appreciation for beautiful art when they've seen beautiful art their entire life. It also stimulates both the unconscious and conscious brain functions, so it's helping to bring together these two brain functions of what's under the surface, and what is their conscious thinking at the time. It increases a child's analytical and problem solving skills.

 When they're looking at this painting, then they're telling you about it, they have to have analytical reasoning to decide what was important. They learn to consider things like what the shape in the background might have been, or what color the dress was that the woman was wearing. They have to really hone in on the power of observation, which is going to be so important in other subjects like nature study or science or math, or even just reading good literature and being able to think critically about the themes that are in that story. Picture study helps them do that. It might take about three minutes. It's so easy and so simple to do. 

We try to overcomplicate some of these things and make them so hard, and we think we need to have a degree in art in order to teach your child about beautiful paintings, but that is not true. All we have to do is simply show them the painting, and have our children look at it, then talk to us about it. Charlotte Mason said "We cannot measure with the influence that one or another artist has upon the child's sense of beauty, upon his power of seeing, as in a picture, the common sites of life; he is enriched more than we know in having really looked at even a single painting"(Vol1. Pg 209). Tthink of this, if you do six over the course of a year, they'll have 18 paintings in the back of their mind. We don't know the influence the beautiful art will have on them as they see the world, as they interact with people. 

The next thing we include in our morning time is poet study. Just like an artist and a composer, you're going to pick a poet to study each term. You're going to pick about six to 12 of their popular pieces to read to your children. The goal of this is not to analyze the poem and break the poem apart and look pentameter, rhyming scheme, or vocabulary and imagery. The goal is not to analyze. The goal again is to expose them to beautiful language. Develop their imaginations, because poetry is such metaphorical and beautiful language that it brings pictures into your children's minds, and they can see different things. Through this they are learnign to talk about what they’re seeing in their head while the story is being read. What was this poem, what were you seeing in your head while we were reading this poem? You can encourage and guide them to think about different aspects, like saying, “ I think that, that word right there, when they're talking about the tree whispering. Oh, have you ever heard that when we're out in nature, like a tree kind of sounds like it's whispering, doesn't it?”

 So many cool things to talk about in these beautiful poems. You're just giving them the delight that poetry can be. If you want to kill your children's love for poetry, make them start to analyze it. We don't want to do that. We want to foster their love for poetry and beautiful language. Charlotte Mason loved this, so much, you know, that she wrote volumes of poetry based on the gospels, and they're so beautiful and so rich to read. It's just a neat way to read some of the gospel stories. You never know what this beautiful poetry might do for your child. While you're reading poetry to your child, it lights up the emotional centers of the brain. Poetry evokes emotion. Sometimes poems are just silly and fun, and sometimes poems are hard, and they talk about the hard things of life and the hard emotions. It's helping build those emotional centers in your children's brain. It also develops complex reasoning again, because you're thinking through some of the metaphors, some of the imagery. You're thinking on a much deeper level than just basic critical recall of reading a sentence. Reading poetry requires your child to think about what the meaning is and what might be there again, not to analyze it, but, just to develop that habit of thinking more critically. 

Poetry really is beautiful. Sometimes, we feel like this might be a waste of time because the kids don’t like it, or they may not understand it. You don't know the influence that this is going to have on your child and again, we're training their affection. If they're used to reading kind of more silly, trivial things, hearing poetry is going to sound really bizarre and really complicated. Have patience with it, trust the process, and be encouraged that it will not be a waste of time ever to expose your children to what is good and true and beautiful.

 Another thing I include in our morning time is recitation. Recitation is when your child has a poem, a speech or a section of a play and they're going to read it out loud for several weeks. So you can choose a poem for them, you can have them pick one if they're older. You can find speeches that have to do with the history time period that you're reading. This can look like the Gettysburg address, Martin Luther King Jr's 'I have a dream' speech, or a section of a play if you're reading through Shakespeare. Your child is going to read that out loud for several weeks. The goal of this is not to memorize the poem or the speech. It is to speak with elocution. This would have been something that was very popular in Charlotte Mason's time period. You would have speakers come and teach about things that they knew about, but you would also have them come recite famous speeches, famous parts of a play, or famous poems. If you've ever seen Anne of Green Gables where she wins a prize for reciting this beautiful poem, that would have been a thing that people would have done. 

The reason why recitation is still so important is because recitation builds public speaking skills. Charlotte Mason, even though she lived over a hundred years ago, said "I hope that my readers will train their children in the art of recitation; in the coming days, more even than in our own it will behoove every educated man and woman to be able to speak effectively in public; and, in learning to recite you learn to speak"(Vol 1, pg 253). Teaching them how to speak with eloquence and annunciation, and have emotion in the way that they're talking is a skill set that is going to help them through their entire life. Charlotte Mason wrote that over a hundred years ago. How much more important is that in today's world? It is so valuable to be able to speak where video is everything. It doesn't matter if you are a farmer or a CEO, you need to be able to speak in public. Whether you're making Instagram reels, or you're giving a keynote address for thousands of people, the ability to speak in public is one that is going to help your children immensely in their life. In recitation, again, just a few minutes a week is going to help them build that skill as well. 

Another thing we include in our morning time is read aloud. So, again, there's lots of different things you can include. I just love it because it's a way to bring beautiful stories into our day when we're still all together as a family. Fables are great for little ones to learn how to narrate, they're very short. Fairytales build imagination and children love those. Shakespeare is something great to read all together as a family, or a biography of someone that you're learning about in history. If you have little ones, seasonal picture books are wonderful to read together as well. 

Reading aloud helps connect neurons in their brain. It helps deepen the neural pathways that are going to help make connections amongst different ideas and helps enrich their learning and understanding of those different subjects. The more connections we make and the deeper those connections are, the stronger those neural pathways are. It also releases oxytocin, which is the bonding chemical. When you're reading aloud to your kids, you're building a bond together as a family, but it's also helping your children bond to the people in the stories, and they feel like they are in that character's shoes. It helps them build empathy and understand humanity better. Reading aloud also develops sequential reasoning. You read your child a fable like The Tortoise and the Hare, for instance, and then your child tells back to you or narrates what it was about. They have to have sequential reasoning and start to learn how to put these pieces of the story together. Did it start with the story being where the rabbit won? No. Okay there was a tortoise, there was a hare, the hare challenges the tortoise to race, you know, What comes next? They have to develop that reasoning skill. Reading aloud also increases cognitive function. So many different parts of your brain are working when someone is reading aloud to you, and it strengthens those areas of your brain to work in different ways. 

All these things say that morning time is not a waste of time. It is, in just 30 minutes a day, preparing your child for all the learning that's coming next. Not only is it shaping them as a person by filling their minds and training their affections with what is true and good and beautiful, it's also helping their brain get ready for the rest of the things that you're doing in the day, so it is not a waste of time. It's helping improve their memory. It's helping increase their cognitive functions. It's helping them develop complex reasoning that they're going to use in the other subjects throughout the day. It's helping build their memory skills. It's also bonding you all together and just creates such a special time that you guys get to share together. 

Cindy Rollins is the one who kind of pioneered this term “morning time.” I'm not even sure when that was. I'm thinking it was like over 10 years ago, from what I recall, but in her book Mere Motherhood, this is what she has to say about morning time, "It is a liturgy. It is a habit that ties the past to the future. A liturgy of love. Morning time is a way to collect little grains of sand. It should not be a way to complicate life but to simplify it."(pg 78) So if you've tried to do morning time before and felt like it was just too complicated, it doesn't have to be, you're over-complicating it. It is very, very simple. If you stick to one or two things a day and keep to some of these simple things that I talked about. If you have something that you want, your children can simulate it like poetry or scripture or music or Shakespeare. Forget the grand schemes. Forget what the mom is doing down the street. Start giving that thing one or two minutes of your time daily and watch the years roll by. For me, the years did roll by and they are rolling by for you. You are never going to have a lot of time, but you do have a little time here and a little time there and those little times all add up to a life.

If there's something that you want to include in your homeschool that you think is important. She says you only have to give it one or two minutes a day and watch the year roll by. So, again, it doesn't have to take up your whole day, just a few minutes, just five minutes, of picture study. Five minutes of listening to beautiful composers, classical music, five minutes of singing a song together, but watch the years roll by and see the difference it makes. We're never going to have a lot of time, so it's a little time here and a little time there and all these seeds of these living ideas are going to take root in your child's mind and they're going to shape who they are as a person. 

I have a free gift that I would love to give all of you for listening to The Feast Life. If you want help planning out your morning time or figuring out what even to include in morning time. I have a free four week morning time packet. It's called Times of Togetherness. All the art and the composers and the poetry are focused on doing things together as a family, and building that connection and that bond, which will really help you kind of start this routine, or jump start it again, if you've kind of fallen out of it. I also include some fun things in here that are just extras. I wouldn't do them during morning time. Save those for later in the day or when you have extra time on the weekends, but there are some cooking and some fun kind of craft things that you could do together all as a family. So if you go to thefeastlife.me and scroll down to the bottom, you'll see a place to get this free morning time packet that I have made for you so that you can get started on this practice of morning time. 

I hope this has encouraged you to delve into some of these subjects that you might want to include in your morning time. I hope you've seen the value that including these subjects will help transform your child's education, and will help grow their brain in so many different ways. It will prepare them for the learning that they're going to do throughout the day. I also want to make this very last point, morning time changed me. By reading beautiful poetry in the morning, by reading beautiful stories, by having our Bible time together. I went from having mornings that were chaotic and stressful, and everybody is in a bad mood, to mornings where our routine just flowed and we’re all ready to start our day. I'm excited to get out of bed in the morning and start our homeschool because I know that we're going to be doing things that feed my heart and my mind and my soul. I started craving morning time because it was changing my affections, and when I saw how it was changing my affections that encouraged me so much to keep this practice going with my family, because I knew that it would change their affections and change their hearts as well. 

There was a time about four years ago, my family was going through a really hard time. The morning time packet from A Gentle Feast that we were using for that cycle included the memory verse that we were doing from Ephesians about the armor of God. Every day we would read and recite that passage together, and it was exactly what we all needed for the hard time that we were going through. We would visualize ourselves putting on this armor of God in the mornings. Our read aloud for that time was Heidi and the sweet story of this little poor Swiss girl and the challenges that she was facing. There'd be times I would literally be crying during our read aloud because it was so touching to me and encouraging to me to see this little girl's faith, and it encouraged me to have more faith for what our family was going through. The hymn that we were doing then, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, was just so perfect for what our family needed at that time. So, I hope this has encouraged you to dive back into morning time, to consider what things you might want to include in morning time for your family, and to build this routine that is really going to be notorious for all of you. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time remember, life’s a feast let’s savor it.