Our Morning Basket for Toddlerhood
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Have you heard of a morning basket? It is a term that comes up so often in the homeschooling world that sometimes I forget it is not a common term in general! Morning basket basically refers to a morning meeting or time of connection to kick off our day. It is somewhat similar to circle time in a school. It is referred to as morning basket because often families keep everything for it in a basket. We do this, sort of!
I wanted to share a look at what our morning basket looks like right now. My son just turned 3 and my daughter turned 1 a couple months ago. Morning basket is mostly designed for my son at this point but my daughter does join and enjoys it as well. As with everything with small children our morning basket is constantly evolving to meet their ever-changing needs. My son became incredibly interested in phonics a couple of months ago so we incorporated more of that into our morning basket, for example.
We start our morning basket with prayers. We have this book and my daughter has a touch and feel siddur. We just sing three quick prayers that my son knows by heart: modeh ani, Torah Tziva, and Shema.
After prayers, I read a nature poem from our nature poem book. There is one poem for each day of the year fitting with the season. I love this as a way to add a bit of seasonal ethos to our mornings. My son loves these poems and often asks me to read extras each day. When he asks that I go back and find any we missed because it was a weekend.
After that, we review the alphabet with our kinesthetic phonics book. My daughter LOVES this. At just over 1 she is obviously not actually doing the phonics but she loves to imitate the sounds and motions after we do them. This is her favorite part of our morning basket for sure! My son knows all the letters now and this is no longer any sort of challenge for him but he enjoys going through them, especially since his little sister enjoys it so much!
Following our alphabet review I open the whiteboard and introduce the date and day of the week. We sing a version of the song “Happy Days” that I adapted to fit our week (I changed how the weekend part goes to fit better for my young children). I didn’t like any of the children’s days of the week songs I found so this was a nice adaption. The song is catchy and even though I have never seen the show, I enjoy it!
On the other side of the whiteboard, I have 4 words with beginning and endings missing. These words generally fit with the season, holiday, or what we are learning. Sometimes they are new words, other times they are very familiar words. I say the word and my son tells me what letter they start and end with. We then sing Hickity Pickity Bumble Bee, which I learned from Project Based Primary’s phonics course she gifted me. We sing it for each word, saying quietly, loudly, clapping, and stomping. This reinforces the words and also works on syllables.
On the side of the board with the date I have a few random letters, words, or digraphs written [in the couple weeks between writing this blog post and publishing it, we switched to short sentences- as I said, it’s constantly evolving!]. We go through these and my son says the sound they make. I then erase them. This just continues to reinforce the letter sounds as well as practicing some blending. He has learned the letters very solidly and is now less interested in most alphabet activities since he knows them. I like giving this little bit of easy reinforcement because of that as well as practicing a little blending.
That ends our morning basket! After morning basket we move on to shelf work starting with introducing any new materials I have not yet introduced.
