2017-2018 Morning Time Reflections - Week Six...

We are six weeks into our 2017-2018 academic year so I thought I'd review what's working and what's not in our Morning Time (MT), since this seems to be the area in which I've made the greatest adjustments. First off, here is our original plan.

As you can see, my original plan was to have MT three days per week. I wondered how this would work since we school four days per week. However, at that time, my niece was going to join us three days a week in our homeschool and I wanted to spread the feast for her as well. Honestly, the first couple of weeks were rough. I chose many of my MT reads from AO Year 7 because it was a good fit for my kids. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a good fit for my niece for a variety of reasons, which I won't get into here. She is no longer joining us in our homeschool, so I will write about MT as it pertains exclusively to my family.

Three days per week proved to be too little time to cover the books I had planned. AO Year 7 books are wonderful and very meaty. Some of them provided too much reading at one time. They needed to be spread out more. Sadly, I let go of Idylls of the King for now. I couldn't quite figure out how to spread it out in a way that we could understand and make sense of it. We even tried the Librovox audio for a couple of weeks because I thought maybe the fact that I couldn't find the rhythm or the beat while reading it, was the reason we couldn't understand it. However, that didn't seem to help. I feel like we don't have a good enough medieval or Arthurian base for real understanding. We are reading other Arthur books this year, which I think will help lay a foundation for a future reading. Tennyson's Idylls is definitely worthy, just not for us in this season. I may come back to it in a few weeks or possibly in our next medieval rotation, but for now, I'm subbing in other random poetry.

I've added Grammar-land by M. L. Nesbitt. I found that Grammar with Ruben was just not getting done throughout the week, so I decided to add in this gem as a read aloud during our MT. It's mostly review, which he needs. Riley scoffed a bit at first because she felt she was way beyond this point, but we're now a couple weeks in and she's been a better sport. I'm reading a chapter per week and once it's done, I hope to add some sentence parsing and diagramming into our MT. Our new MT, now looks something like this...

Day One
How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
The Mystery of the Periodic Table by Wiker and Bendick, alternated with The Elements by Theodore Gray as scheduled in AO Year 6

Day Two
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
Grammar-land by M. L. Nesbett

Day Three
The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin
Whatever Happened to Penny Candy by Richard Maybury

Day Four

The Story of Painting by H. W. Janson

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

In addition to the read alouds, I'm adding various poetry, music, and art each day. Levi has been joining us for MT and I want him to learn The Pledge of Allegiance, so we recite it some days as well. I would like to add more memory work down the road. Possible other additions could include, health, Shakespeare, and drawing, but for now, I don't feel like I should add until we finish or take away something else. We will continue as planned for the next six weeks and reassess at that time. 

Overall, I'm happy to be back at MT and I think the kids are too. I love the conversations we've had from some of the books. We're also doing a bit of notebooking through the chemistry books, which I will share in another post. It's been fun to look at everyone's drawings and see what each person took from the book.