morning time - Sara Raising Wild

A Week in the Life: Adventure Homeschool Family

What does the week of a homeschool family look like? Well that will all depend on the family. Actually you’d probably get almost as many different answers as families you ask. We tend to be a diverse bunch!

But you’re here because you’d like some adventure in your life, and maybe because you resonate with our sort of laid back style over here. So before I lay out what our week looks like, let’s take a minute to talk about our style of home education, because this plays a HUGE roll in how we’ve come to this current schedule.

How We Got Here: Our Homeschool Style

If you looked in on our week a few years ago, you probably wouldn’t even recognize us. Being parents who came out of public and private schools, we only knew the typical school model for education. I knew there was something else out there, but I didn’t quite know where to find it. Over time, with research and meeting other homeschool families I started to figure out what it was that really jived with what we wanted for our kiddos and family life. (Side note, this is an ever evolving process. A perk of homeschool is that you can always change, at any time to better suit your family.)

For one, our homeschool IS a part of our family life, and our family life is a part of our homeschool. We believe that education is what naturally happens as a result of experiences. And so we put our children in the way of experiences that will help them grow and learn (think unschooling/child-led learning). In addition, I really resonated with some aspects of the Charlotte Mason (CM) method of homeschool, and so we do the majority of our non-experiential learning through “living books” (think books that are regular stories that you can relate to… not text books).

CM is also where our practice of nature study came from, and the entire reason I realized that we could use adventuring as a whole aspect of our lives and education. One other practice popular in the CM world that we adopted and love, is “morning time” (also called circle time and morning basket. You can learn more about our morning time here). Lastly, we have followed a few formal curriculums over the years, but generally I prefer to make up our own (except for math… that is one subject I INSIST on outsourcing!).

So with those things in mind, here is a typical week for us when we are not roadschooling:

Monday

The first day of our “school” week, Monday is the day we set aside as our most important day. I am NOT a procrastinator, and for the sake of keeping anxiety at bay like to front-end load my work. And so Mondays are the day we most focus on accomplishing what I’d like for us to cover for the week. We spend about an hour, sometimes more, in morning time, and then we all split up to accomplish our own personal work. This includes individual study, study with mom, and chores. Usually the kids aren’t finished until after lunch-time, but once they are done they get a little bit of screen time and the rest of the day free to do as they like. (At the moment, the three older kids go to a class in the afternoon for an hour or two on M/W).

Tuesday

Free day. Sometimes we will use Tuesdays to get ahead on our work if we know we would like to adventure somewhere on one of our typical “school” days. This can also be a catch up day if anyone did not finish their work from the day before. If we’re feeling up to it, sometimes we’ll find a short hike, playground, or regular play date for the afternoon. Or grocery shopping. Because, you know, responsibilities.

Wednesday

The second of our three major school days, the flow is the same as on Monday. We hope to finish our work a little earlier than usual on Wednesdays because our public school friends have a half day, and we go to church at night, so we need to eat dinner earlier.

Thursday

Adventure day! This is the day I typically plan our bigger adventures, and so I make sure nothing else is on the schedule in case we want to linger for a while, or have a long drive (I’ve been known to drive 2 hours for a good time). However, if we plan a big adventure for Friday, then Thursday becomes a regular day like Monday and Wednesday. We like to keep our schedule flexible so we can more easily schedule adventures with friends, or work around the weather (HAH! Weather in San Diego? Well… yeah, sometimes. But that includes snow and tide charts).

Friday

Our final regular school day. Yes you’ve read that right, we only do our “formal” schooling three days a week. The fun thing about our Friday morning time is that we can incorporate any interesting things we found from the previous day’s aventure into our studies. Often this means researching our findings and questions using books, internet, or TV. For example, after noticing an orb weaver web, we spent a morning looking up spiders and learning about their lives and how they make their webs. The kids recorded their findings in their nature journals.

Saturday

If needed, we will do work on a Saturday, but that’s usually for the weeks that we did a LOT of adventuring and completely neglected our indoor studies. Saturday is typically a day for friends, fun, errands, and cubing competitions or any other sports or clubs the kids might be in at the time.

Sunday

God’s day!

Homeschool adventure hike, measuring wingspan

So there it is! Our week summed up. If you want a deeper look into what we study, or how I manage homeschool with 5 kids and a variety of ages, you can find that here. In the meantime, let me know in the comments what you think and what questions you have!

Morning Time: An Adventure Homeschooler’s Best Friend

Morning Time: have you heard of it? And no, I don’t mean the time of day. “Morning time”, also called circle time or morning basket, is a part of your homeschool day when your family gathers together to learn and share. And technically, it doesn’t have to be done in the morning. But that’s just what works best for us.

There are plenty of ways to do morning time, and a TON of learning you can cover in it. In fact, for some families this is the bulk of their homeschool. So what is it exactly?

What is Morning Time?

Morning time is when we all sit and learn together. It’s an opportunity to cover some subjects with all of your children, and to connect with one another. It’s the more enriching part of your day, when you might cover subjects like famous artists, composers, folk songs, and poetry, but it can also be history, geography, vocabulary, grammar, math or even just reading a good book together. (And don’t under estimate picture books. Even with big kids, they’re a real winner!). For a fantastic list of activities to include in your tool box, head over to Read Aloud Revival to see the list that Sarah MacKenzie put together.

Morning time is also a great opportunity to incorporate games into your learning. Because yes, games can also be educational and there is even an entire method of homeschool built around it (it’s called gameschooling).

Why Morning Time?

So why is morning time such a great tool for those who look to adventure for their education? Because this is the time we get to FOLLOW UP on the amazing things we find! Were the trees changing colour? Research why. Did you find scat? Look it up and learn how to identify different types in your area. Found an animal den? Learn all you can about that animal. This is also a great time for talking about safety and stewardship in the outdoors. Morning time can include practicing setting up a tent (then you can spend the night in it). It can be a time to record findings in a nature journal and learn more about those things and add extra notes. It can be used to research new hikes and places to explore, schedule it onto the calendar, and plan for it, including a packing list, budget, and mapping out the journey.

In our home we’ve dabbled in a bit of all of these things, depending on what we’re most interested in at the time. But the thing we always begin our day with is the Bible. We always come prayerfully before God as we dive into the study of his word. Sometimes this is also accompanied by a hymn that we learn, or worship music to set the mood. We also like to share prayer requests and spend time in prayer for one another. Then we move into whatever subjects we’re into at the moment.

What Does Morning Time Look Like?

Now you might be trying to envision this, and seeing my children all sitting quietly and happily around the table listening to the words that poetically drip from my mouth. If thats what you’re picturing… erase it. Afterall, I do have five BOYS and two of them are rather wild and loud.

Figuring out how to make morning work for us has been a journey – one that we’re still on. But I have found a number ways to make it flow more smoothly and to encourage the younger children to hang in there with us for while, and to be reasonably (sometimes) quiet. For one, I’ve used a “morning time tool box”. This was literally an adorable giant wood tool box filled with all sorts of quiet activities. There were puzzle books, colouring, scissors and glue sticks, paint by sticker books, play dough, regular sticker books, water colour paints, calligraphy pens, lots of sketch pads, etc. The kids could also grab puzzles or any other quiet things they were currently working on. At other times we’ve taken our studies outside so they could move their bodies through the yard, bounce on a ball or trampoline, or just hang upside down on the furniture.

But my personal favourite (and theirs, too) is a tea party! This one is a total hit. Typically I will try and bake something special and serve up a couple different types of tea in cute teapots. Since downsizing, we rely more on tea bags, but it’s not really the tea or treat that matters so much. It’s also perfectly acceptable to serve up cups of juice and a plate of cookies. The point is that they get a special treat that keeps them happy while you read aloud to them. (Just be sure to have napkins ready to go for the inevitable spill so that interruptions are minimal.)

So, my fellow adventure loving home educator, if morning time isn’t already a part of your homeschool, I highly encourage you to give it a try. There are endless possibilities, and just the fact that your whole family is together makes it a complete gem.

For further ideas and inspiration for your morning time, I would highly encourage you to give a listen to Pam Barnhill’s “Your Morning Basket” podcast. She is a treasure trove of information and was my go-to mama for getting our morning time rolling.

Have you tried Morning Time in your homeschool?

Tag: morning time

A Look: Typical Homeschool Week