Spring Morning Basket with my Littles

Morning Basket with my littles is one of my favorite parts of our homeschool day to plan. Who doesn’t enjoy stories, songs, and rhymes? It’s fun!

Our Morning Basket follows a predictable rhythm with monthly changes to the ingredients that make up that rhythm. For example, our folksongs, memory verse, and nursery rhymes change each month. I keep my littles grounded to the seasons and rhythms of nature this way. Another way I do this is through our seasonal story times, but that will be another post.

We begin our Basket with an opening verse. I found our opening and closing verses in Joyful Movement by Donna Simmons of Christopherus. In our CM homeschool we pull in aspects of Waldorf that are in agreement with CM’s method. In researching Waldorf I’ve found many areas that I believe complement and agree with Charlotte. Seeing the child as a whole person and seeking to educate head, heart, and hands goes well with Charlotte’s first principle that children are born persons.

Back to our Basket, we begin with a verse:

Good morning dear Earth

Good morning dear Sun

Good morning dear trees and flowers every one

Good morning dear beasts and birds in the tree

Good morning to you and good morning to me!

We follow this with a folksong. We have been using songs from Come Follow Me! 1 and 2 by Lorraine Nelson Wolf. These are gentle songs of the seasons. We choose one for each month. They are also available on Spotify.

After folksong we recite our memory verse. April’s verse has been John 3:16.

This is followed by our Bible story. Right now we are using 365 Great Bible Stories. I like that this book has short daily readings and each reading includes a few statements or questions to inspire deeper thought on the story.

After our Bible story we sing our hymn. We are singing the Doxology this year. Then we pray The Lord’s Prayer.

Now we move into the poetry/folktale portion of our basket. This year we have been focusing on nursery rhymes. We are using the first two volumes of My Book House from which I read aloud a few poems or a story each day. Then the children recite their nursery rhymes. I assign each child a rhyme for each month. At the end of the month they share their recitations with family and in videos that we post on Instagram. I have been pulling the nursery rhymes from Lavender’s Blue. I love this book. The illustrations are beautiful. Our rhymes for April are Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and Little Bo-Peep.

After recitation it’s time for another folksong. This month we are learning Wild Mountain Thyme which we found on the Ambleside Online folksong list. This is the first month we have taken one from AO’s list. I find the AO selections to be excellent but a bit too advanced for this age group. My six year old heard Wild Mountain Thyme and asked if we could do it for the month of April. I think it will actually be our song for April and May because it is more complex than the songs they’ve learned up until now. Prior to this we’ve had a lot of fun learning the songs from Peter Yarrow’s songbooks. There are several of these. The illustrations are lovely and it includes chords as well as a cd.

We then close our Morning Basket time with another verse from Joyful Movement.

Birds in the air

Stones on the land

Fishes in the water

I’m in God’s hand.