Morning Gathering Time

Every so often I throw around the idea of starting our day with some time together before we set about the school task for the day. Call it what you want...Circle Time, Meeting Time or my pick Morning Meeting Time but the idea is to gather together and hit some highlights before we do our school day.

Kendra at Preschoolers and Peace has been chatting about her Circle Time for quite a long time. She even sells a Circle Time document which has lots of ideas in it- by all appearances anyway. I have not purchased it to see it for myself. Perhaps at some point I will try it out...if my plans need help!

The first thing I did was to decide what I wanted to be part of our Morning Meeting Time. Here's my list:

• weather- checking our weather station, making weather observations
  
• Bible- devotion, morning prayer (from the Book of Common Prayer, Episcopal Church), and church calendar stuff goes here- we may be attending a non-denominational church right now, but my kids will know the liturgical year!
  
• Songs- we are working through a book about hymns right now and we do a for fun song too
• Prayer- we cycle through family, friends, and community (ours and beyond)
• Pledge- every homeschooler should know the Pledge of Allegiance!
• Calendar Time- pointing out the day, date, year and what day was yesterday and will be tomorrow. We do the same thing with months. This is helpful to the preschooler in our lives.
• Day in History- you can use This Day in History (from History.com) to see what happened on any day in history. That's been a fun exercise.
• Daily Quest- this is when I announce and go over the Daily Quest with the kids. I need to tweak this some. Stay tuned for updates.
• Geography- not everyday but some days there will be a daily geography exercise or drill. I have all kinds of geography resources perfect for this. The Trail Guides to US and World Geography come to mind with their format of daily drills.
• Sketch Tuesday- when we aren't doing geography we can do our Sketch Tuesday assignments. That way we are ready to turn them in well for the next Monday's deadline.
• Nature Journal- after we've been out to discover or we've made a find and want to document it, this will be a good time of day to follow up with our drawings and descriptions in our journals.

After thinking of what might be included in a Morning Meeting Time, I knew I'd need to plan it. Of course! Below is the form I made for planning our Morning Meeting Time. I will attempt to load it up to my page at Homeschool Launch if you would like to download it for yourself. Nothing fancy, but I think it does the job.

Another site for ideas on what to do with calendar time is Mathwire.com. Check out this link for
Morning Math Routines.

You can follow this link to my Homeschool Launch page if you'd like to download a copy of my Morning Meeting Planner. It's been a long time since I put anything up over there so I had to sort of start over. Blah. But it's done now...